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CHRISTIANITY | 

AN INTERPRETATION I 



CHRISTIANITY 



AN INTERPRETATION 




By 



S. D. McCONNELL,D.D. 

^LL.D., D.C.L. 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 

LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 

1912 



^'^^^.\ 

A^^ 



Copyright, 1912, bt 
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 



THE QUINN * SO DEN CO. PRESS 
BAHWAY, N. J. 



©CI.A300018 

Mai 



TO MY GOOD FRIEND 

SIR WILLIAM MATHER 

DOCTOR OF LAWS; PRIVY COUNCILLOR 
WITH GRATEFUL AFFECTION 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. Are We Still Christian? . 


PAGE 
3 


II. 


Immoral Salvation 


21 


III. 


The Christ of the Gospels 


49 


IV. 


The Primitive Christ . 


11 


V. 


Body and Soul .... 


87 


VI. 


The Basis of Immortality . 


. 103 


VII. 


Immortability .... 


119 


VIII. 


Jesus' Teaching .... 


131 


IX. 


The First to Cross 


145 


X. 


Bodies Celestial .... 


. 163 


XI. 


The Moral Effect 


177 


XII. 


The New Creation 


185 


XIII. 


The Christian Church 


203 


XIV. 


The Sum of the Whole Matter 


. 229 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 



" The highest duty is to determine what is of per- 
manent value; not to cleave to words, but to find out 
what is essential. The ' whole ' Christ, the ' whole ' 
Gospel, if we mean by this the external image taken in 
all its details and set up for imitation, is just as bad and 
deceptive a shibboleth as the * whole ' Luther and the 
like. It is bad because it enslaves us, and it is deceptive 
because the people who proclaim it do not take it seri- 
ously, and could not do so if they tried. They cannot 
do so because they cannot cease to feel, understand, and 
judge as children of their age ". — Harnack. 



I 

ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 

More than fifty years ago Dr. Strauss asked this 
question in a volume which aroused in the religious 
world much interest and more indignation. The mere 
suggestion was an insult. It was to accuse the Chris- 
tian world of hypocrisy or stupidity. The writer 
was denounced as would be one who had aspersed the 
chastity of his mother. 

To-day the question is being asked by multitudes. 
But not in the same spirit. Professor Harnack's 
"What is Christianity.?" is the fifty years belated 
response to Strauss. For if " Christianity " be what 
Strauss and his denouncers conceived it to be, it has 
already to a great extent disappeared and bids fair 
to be left behind, a stupendous but pathetic ruin, like 
many an ancient city in which men one time dwelt. 

As I look out to sea from where I write my eye 
rests upon the massive walls of a medieval monastery, 
standing in the middle of an island. The island was 
once of many times its present area, but little by 
little the sea has reduced its compass. Sometimes 
by a long period of gnawing and nibbling about its 
edges, sometimes by mighty storms engulfing huge 
segments. The castle stands in the midst of an ever- 

3 



4 CHRISTIANITY 

lessening area. I speculate as to whether it will be ever 
overwhelmed? and when? And are the same mighty 
forces which are obliterating it building up islands 
elsewhere upon which generations of men still to 
come will erect other structures of like purpose? And 
will they in their turn pass in the endless succession 
of the ages? 

75 Christianity founded upon a rock? If so, what 
ground do its walls really enclose? And what out- 
buildings may be washed away before the impregna- 
ble wall be reached? 

During many ages the Church busied herself in 
what " safe " men love to call constructive work. To 
the very small and simple body of religious belief with 
which it started it added first one, then another, and 
another: — The Resurrection of the Body ; the Descent 
into Hell ; the Trinity ; Sacramental Grace ; the Real 
Presence; the Virgin Birth; the Doctrine of the 
Atonement; the Fall of Man; — then, after a long 
interval, the Inspiration of Scripture; Justification 
by Faith ; and finally, the Infallibility of the Pope, — 
all of which, it has been maintained, " except a man 
believe faithfully he cannot be saved ". It is now 
nearly a century since this process of dogma-making 
ceased. Since then only two new ones have pos- 
sessed sufficient vitality to organize a body about 
them, — Mormonism and Christian Science. So far 
as the world to-day has any interest in religious 
doctrines, it is not to propound or maintain them 
but to examine and dismiss them. This process has 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 5 

already gone far, much farther than is generally 
realized. Dogmas which fifty years ago were as- 
serted and generally believed to be essential to the 
Christian faith have been so completely dismissed 
and forgotten that the average man finds it dif- 
ficult to believe that men were ever willing to fight, 
much less to suff*er for them. Yet within the memory 
of many of us Mr. Gladstone was battling for the lit- 
eral truth of the story of creation in Genesis ; Bishop 
Colenso was excommunicated for questioning the de- 
tails of the exodus from Egypt; the Dean of St. 
Paul's was maintaining that " if every book, every 
Word, every syllable " of Holy Scripture were not 
inspired and inerrant, the foundation was gone from 
under the Christian religion; one of the greatest 
scholars of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland was 
deposed for teaching that the " Mosaic System " was 
not in effect until after the Exile; and an equally 
eminent and godly minister of the same Church in 
America was dismissed for asserting that the book 
of Isaiah was a composite, and not the work of one 
inspired man. All this, really so recent, seems as 
remote as the dark ages. Now, even the Westminster 
Confession and the Thirty-nine Articles are never 
heard of and never cared about save when at an ec- 
clesiastical council the question of their formal re- 
tention or rejection is mooted. The newspapers no 
longer report such matters. The Reviews no longer 
open their pages to such discussions. They are no 
longer interesting. Would the editor of the Nine- 



6 CHRISTIANITY 

teenth Century to-day give space to Mr. Gladstone 
and Mr. Huxley to debate about the Gaderene 
swine? — allowing that men equally gifted were will- 
ing to spend their time upon such a controversy. 

This disintegration of dogmas is going steadily 
on. They have not been disproved or formally re- 
jected, but simply worn away, as the rising tide dis- 
solves the edges of a sandy shore. The question 
which now interests us is, How far will this process 
go? and when will it be stayed? The world will never 
be without a religion. That syncretism of historic 
reality, pagan cult, Roman jurisprudence, Greek 
speculation, Teutonic gloom, and ethnic emotion 
which we call " Christianity " has long satisfied the 
needs of men. It cannot go on doing so without 
modifications so fundamental that one hesitates to 
even suggest them. 

It is a condition for existence of a religion that 
it must satisfy the moral, intellectual, social needs 
of its time. This Christianity as it has long been 
presented has largely ceased to do. The ethical sense 
of the modern world reached a point a good while 
ago at which it began to condemn large portions of 
the Old Testament story. Actions there represented 
as having been done by the command or with the 
approval of God are now pronounced immoral. 
Miriam's song of triumph is the gloating of a savage 
chieftainess over her enemies dead. Jael beguiles 
Sisera by the proffer of hospitality, lies to him, 
treacherously murders him, and bursts into a paean 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 7 

of praise to God. By his command the Canaanites are 
massacred, men, women, and innocent babes ; Agag 
is hewn to pieces ; the priests of Baal are slaughtered 
by the prophet; Jacob robs his brother, deceives his 
father, and therefore wins the divine benediction, — 
and so on. The imprecatory Psalms cannot be read 
now without a shudder. The old defence, " may not 
God do what he will with his own? " no longer serves. 
Men cannot worship a god who is not better than they 
are themselves. It is true that we have come to see 
that the Old Testament story is the more true for its 
record of these things. It represents men and times 
as controlled by the ethical standards which had been 
reached at that stage of moral evolution. But it 
must be seen that in proportion as it does so it dis- 
places the Bible from the position of universal au- 
thority which it has occupied for so long. 

In the same way the moral demand of the modern 
world begins to show uneasiness in presence of the 
New Testament as well. It is seriously questioned 
whether the " other worldliness " so exalted there is 
compatible with the maintenance of good citizenship, 
or indeed with any social order whatever. The in- 
junction to " resist not evil ", to " hate father and 
mother ", to " take no thought for the morrow ", to 
" sell all you have and give to the poor ", and the 
like, are regarded with serious doubt. Were they 
meant as practical rules of conduct for a stable so- 
ciety, or were they the exhortations of those who 
believed themselves part of the company of a ship- 



8 CHRISTIANITY 

wrecked world soon to be broken up and engulfed? 
It cannot be denied that the practical code of the 
earliest Christian age was moulded with reference to 
the world view then prevalent. 

" Not only is no recognition given to art and letters, 
but even the relations of domestic life are discour- 
aged. The slave is dissuaded from care about his 
liberty, on the express ground that it is not worth 
while on the brink of a great catastrophe to assume 
any new position, or commit the heart by new ties. 
The time is too short, the crisis too near for the 
career of a free life or the building of a human 
home. It is better for every one to continue as he 
is; and instead of waiting to have the world perish 
from him to regard himself as already dead to the 
world. As seen from their point of view all tem- 
poral claims sink into negation. The constitutions, 
the arts, the culture of civilized nations were about 
to be superseded and the Christian needed only such 
provisional arrangements as might serve during the 
world's brief respite. Equally natural and suitable 
to their conceived position was the non-resistance 
principles of the early disciples. What right could 
be worth contending for on the dawn of a great day 
of redress when every wrong would be brought to its 
account ? Who would carry a cause before Dikast or 
Proconsul when Eternal Justice was pledged to hear 
it to-morrow? When the great assizes of the universe 
are about to be opened it were a poor thing for the 
suitors to begin fighting in the vestibule." 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 9 

Here, again, a more enlightened and just study of 
history has turned the point of the objection. The 
fact has come to be recognized that the early Chris- 
tians as well as Jesus himself did expect the speedy 
if not immediate " restitution of all things ", and did 
square their living and teaching by that belief. This 
does undoubtedly bring relief from a sense of obliga- 
tion to observe injunctions which are at the same 
time felt to be both impracticable and dangerous. 
But it must be seen once more that it breaks down 
that absolute and universal authority once allowed 
to the New Testament. 

Thus the ethical needs of the stage at which we 
are has brought its powerful reinforcement to the 
spirit of scientific investigation in examining the 
origins of Christianity. It is true that the mass of 
believers go on believing and of preachers go on 
preaching and of teachers go on teaching as though 
nothing had occurred. This will always be so. Mis- 
taken beliefs, beliefs which have grown and spread 
until their branches fill the air, die always at the 
root. The branches may appear green and vigorous 
for many a day after the nourishing juices have 
ceased to rise. The dogma of " Inspiration ", whose 
place among Christian doctrines was always illegiti- 
mate, — ^together with its attendant obscurantism, 
superstition, and bibliolatry, must be regarded as 
among the structures of sandy foundation which the 
tides of time have already disintegrated. 

Again, the conscience and the intelligence of our 



10 CHRISTIANITY 

time have joined together to push from its place a 
dogma far more ancient than that of Inspiration, viz., 
the " Fall of Man ". Indeed it may be said that this 
doctrine is the substructure of every " system " of 
theology formulated within the last fifteen centuries. 
It is assumed even now that it accounts for the fact 
that " the word was made flesh ". Nevertheless con- 
science repudiates it; science shows its impossibility. 

The existence of moral evil is a melancholy fact, 
and there are many theories to account for its pres- 
ence. According to the one before us, there was, 
long ago, a primeval world which was a paradise. 
It had a genial climate and a fertile soil. No ice- 
bound oceans or burning deserts, no thorns or bram- 
bles, no predacious beast or pestilential wind was 
there. The world was young and wholesome. No 
nerve had ever thrilled with pain nor any living crea- 
ture seen the face of Death. In this paradise God 
walked and was lonely. In it he set the newly fash- 
ioned Adam, the first individual of his race. Into his 
arms he graciously gave the maiden mother of us 
all. He created them immortal. Their wisdom was 
transcendent, their goodness absolute. 

With Adam God made a " covenant ". The matter 
of agreement was that perfect obedience and un- 
broken righteousness would be rewarded by continual 
bliss and warranty against pain and death, and that 
for disobedience the penalty should be capital. In 
this covenant, moreover, Adam did not act for him- 
self alone, but as the legal representative of all his 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 11 

race yet unbegotten. They were to have their chance 
in him, and to stand forfeit if he failed.^ The simple 
test for the first man's power of moral endurance 
was to be his abstention from a certain attractive 
fruit in the garden where he dwelt. An insidious 
tempter appeared from some unknown and unsus- 
pected quarter, enlisted the more pliable nature of 
Eve on the side of disobedience, and through her 
broke down the moral resistance of man. He failed 
in the test, and catastrophe unspeakable was let 
loose. Smitten suddenly with shame and fear, the 
offenders crept away, already moribund. The voice 
of God rolling in thunder revealed his hiding place. 
The flashing lightning of an offended heaven burned 
between them and their bower. The indignant earth 
shot up from her bosom the upas and the deadly 
nightshade among the forest, and choked the wheat 
with thorns and brambles. The wild beasts, filled 
for the first time with rage and hunger, rent and de- 
voured one another. The natures of the offenders 
underwent a sudden ferment which left them trans- 
fonned and totally depraved. Their unborn children 
not only inherited the taint, but were subject to all 
the penalties appended to the original contract broken 
by their father and representative.^ 

^ Whether the covenant were to remain in force forever, or 
whether after a certain period of obedience man was to be 
confirmed in an indefeasible right of immortality, has never 
been agreed. 

2 At this point " Augustinians " and *' Pelagians " part com- 
pany. 



12 CHRISTIANITY 

Thus, death, physical and moral, the depravity of 
every son of Adam, and all the thousand ills that 
flesh is heir to, both in this world and in any world 
to come, are accounted for by that event which in 
popular religion and in technical theology is called 
the " Fall ". The Prayer Book, in its wedding serv- 
ice, makes it the foundation of its philosophy of 
marriage. In the Larger Catechism appended to the 
Confession of Faith it is stated baldly : — " The Fall 
brought upon mankind the loss of communion with 
God, his displeasure and curse, so that we are by 
nature children of wrath, bond slaves of Satan, and 
justly liable to all punishment in this world and the 
world to come ". It is equally present, explicitly 
or implicitly, in all theological systems. 

Now, whence came this notion which has so power- 
fully affected the religious life of the Christian 
world? In the Old Testament there is no after refer- 
ence to it whatever. Throughout its whole record 
every instance of moral obliquity is referred to the 
deliberate and wanton choice of the person offending. 
His fault is never modified or the guilty quality of 
his nature deemed to be affected by his relation to 
Adam. He is in every case accounted worthy or 
blameworthy, not on account of what his nature is 
qua man, but for what he does of his own choice. 
It is also noteworthy that it is entirely unknown to 
Rabbinical Judaism. 

It is never referred to in any form by Jesus. If 
what is called Christianity contained nothing but 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 13 

what could be referred to his authority, its doctrinal 
compass would shrink amazingly. The dogma in 
question would never have been heard of. 

What then will account for the importance allowed 
to a doctrine which science declares to be untrue, 
and against which the moral sense revolts.'' Its his- 
tory, in rough lines, can easily be traced. When the 
doctrine of Vicarious Redemption had been elaborated 
as an interpretation of Jesus' work, logic required 
as its substructure a vicarious condemnation. The 
two arose and will disappear together. The moral 
progress of the race has already left them behind 
it. Historically it was elaborated by that great sys- 
tem builder, Augustine. It passed, together with the 
rest of his theology, into general acceptance in the 
Western Church. It was developed in curious detail 
during the busy idleness of the scholastic period. 
Dante popularized for the Latin peoples the story 
of the Edenic paradise. Milton did the same for the 
English-speaking race. Luther, the Augustinian 
monk, brought the theory with him from his cloister. 
Calvin, the very incarnation of legalism, made it the 
starting point of his system. Through these various 
channels it has come, since the Reformation, to be 
popularly accepted as the Christian belief concerning 
the moral nature and status of man. But while it still 
holds its place in doctrinal standards it has ceased 
to be a conviction to which one may appeal to influ- 
ence conduct. What preacher would dare to assert 
baldly, " You deserve to be damned for your share 



14 CHRISTIANITY 

in Adam's disobedience"? The dogma is no longer 
held on the authority of Augustine, or rejected with 
Pelagius ; it has simply fallen out of sight in conse- 
quence of its intrinsic unworthiness and essential im- 
morality. 

But if the Edenic legend does not serve as a founda- 
tion for dogma, has it then any serious significance? 
Is it anything more than one of the fond imaginings 
of a childish world? I reply, it is a compendium of 
that story which is writ large in the whole Hebrew- 
Christian scriptures, — the story of the origin and de- 
velopment of the moral life of man, and of God's deal- 
ing therewith. Whether it originated in Babylon or 
Egypt, whether from Moses or Manes, is of little 
consequence. The marvellous thing is the story itself. 
This second chapter of Genesis, like the first, moves 
with majestic strides, an seon in a paragraph, with 
space for a year of God's days between verses. It is 
couched in a language so oriental and so poetic that 
even Augustine warned against dangerous literalness 
in its interpretation. It first traces creation from 
nebulous, chaotic fire mist to the introduction of the 
creature fashioned in the image and likeness of the 
gods. This creature is called Adam, " the Man ". 
This having been done, it recapitulates the history of 
creation with reference to the being in which it cul- 
minated. It refers, most briefly, to the preparation 
of the earth to his uses, connects him as to his 
physical side with matter, and then enters upon the 
history of the development and progress of man's 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 15 

moral and religious life. This is the theme of the 
entire Scripture. But this progress is conceived 
throughout as having been by a series of continuously 
recurring selections. The first of these is in the story 
before us. There is no intimation that " Adam " 
and " Eve " were the first of the race. The Scrip- 
tural interest begins at that point in its evolution at 
which the moral sense appeared, the capacity " to 
know good and evil ". Man the animal, the crown 
of the animals, had no doubt dwelt upon the earth for 
ages before. In the Edenic poem — allegory — what 
you will, — the spiritual history of the race commences 
with the first individuals in whom the moral faculty 
had shown itself. Who, or when, or where, is of 
little account. It must have been at some time, — or 
many times. It is a selection of the fit. In the sequel 
Genesis occupies itself only with those in whom this 
moral progression moves. Seth and his line are fol- 
lowed, while the other sons and daughters of Adam 
remain in sight only for a little way, to where they 
founded nations, passed through the stage of pas- 
toral life, concentrated in cities, blossomed into art, 
burst into music, and then pass forever out of sight 
and hearing. Afterward, Abraham is selected from 
among the Acadians, while they are left to complete 
the cycle of a civilization untouched by any divine 
spirit, and then sink into decay. Isaac is taken and 
his brethren left aside. Jacob is chosen and Esau 
left. The Bible is as remorseless as science itself. 
For its purpose moral fitness is the test. The calHng 



16 CHRISTIANITY 

of " Adam " seems therefore to be but the first of 
many such selections, the first of many of its kind. 

The story does indeed sound far away and strange. 
Surely nothing could be more unsuitable upon which 
to build a system of formal dogma. But as a piece 
of profound ethnic wisdom it shows an insight mar- 
vellous enough. It rests morality upon those broad 
foundations where the commimis sensus of the normal 
man looks for it. It presents (1) a personal God 
who can speak; (2) a human faculty which can ap- 
prehend; (3) a power of will which can choose; (4) 
that the essence of wrong-doing consists not in dam- 
age to the community, but in disobedience to the 
Eternal Law. 

Therefore the Lord-God said, " Behold the man is 
become as one of us to know good and evil ". 

"And so I live, you see, 
Go through the world, try, prove, reject. 
Prefer, still struggling to eflFect 
My warfare; happy that I can 
Be crossed and thwarted as a man, 
Not left, in God's contempt, apart. 
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart. 
Tame in earth's paddock as her prize". 

Make what allowance one will for the obscurity of 
the story, the fact remains that the moral progress 
of the race has been but the completion of the pic- 
ture there sketched in broad outhne. The evolution- 
ist comprehends it best; the systematic theologian 
least. We find ourselves following the sweep of a 
majestic movement, similar in kind to that from the 



ARE WE STILL CHRISTIAN? 17 

monad to the man. Here again, as at other points, 
the progress halted, helpless or at fault, and God 
vouchsafed the gift of a new impulse. Here it is 
nothing less than the inbreathing of his own spirit. 
It endows the recipient with that divine quality in 
virtue of which he is capable, under suitable condi- 
tions, of being " born again ". It accounts for the 
complex and contradictory impulses which contend 
in the arena of the human soul. It accounts for the 
old man as well as the new. It recognizes the sur- 
viving ape and tiger which chatter and growl among 
the human affections. It brings man in sight of " the 
tree of life " and bids him long mightily for its fruits. 
It bids him work among thorns and briars, but when 
he lifts up his face he learns that he has " become as 
one of us ". It gives him sanction for conduct and 
hope of endless progression. It accounts for the 
faults of the patriarch, the faith of the apostle, and 
the faultlessness of the Perfect Man. 



IMMORAL SALVATION 



** In an inscription from the Egyptian monuments, 
which dates back to the early days of Moses^ there is 
reference to a then ancient legend of a rebellion of man- 
kind against the gods; of an edict of destruction against 
the human race; and of a divine interposition for the 
rescue of the doomed people. In that legend a promi- 
nent place is given to human blood, which was mingled 
with the juice of mandrakes and offered as a drink to 
the gods, and afterward poured out to overflow and 
revivify the earth '\ — Trumbull, " Blood Covenant ", 



n 

IMMORAL SALVATION 

I WISH to emphasize still more strongly that the 
revolt of a large portion of the modem world from 
Christianity as it has been presented is due not to 
intellectual but to moral causes. It is true that the 
extension of knowledge has rendered impossible the 
acceptance of a multitude of fond beliefs, easy for 
former times. The six natural days of creation, the 
universality of the Deluge, the divine sanction of the 
Levitical system, and the like, have been rendered un- 
tenable simply by increasing knowledge. But no one 
is seriously disturbed thereby. It is so plain that 
there is no necessary connection between these things 
and Christ that they may disappear without hurt, so 
soon as misguided orthodoxy shall cease to see in 
them things which are not there. If farther increase 
of knowledge should re-establish them, well and good. 
The Intelligence can listen to arguments, and is al- 
ways open to proofs. But the Conscience is another 
thing. Its judgments are final and it resents any 
attempt at argument. 

Now, the common moral sense has reached a stage 
at which it turns away from that dogma which has 
long been exhibited as the very foundation of Chris- 

21 



^2 CHRISTIANITY 

tianity, and as the true and evident interpretation of 
the person and work of Christ, — the dogma of Vicari- 
ous Atonement. Around this theory has gathered so 
much of the doctrine and the emotion of religion 
that to challenge it must seem to many as a for- 
bidden deed. Nevertheless it must be done, in the 
interest of truth and of Christianity itself. 

The historical fact is that Jesus was put to death 
as a malefactor. The times were cruel, and it so 
happened that the mode of his death was by cruci- 
fixion. It took place on the common execution 
ground outside the city of Jerusalem. To a western 
visitor to the capital the sight had little noteworthy 
about it. He scarcely singled it out for notice from 
among the hundreds of crosses in every province 
upon which he had seen men writhing during his 
travels in the East. If he had made any special 
inquiry about this oifender he was told that he had 
been a rather interesting, and probably quite harm- 
less man, a dreaming Jew, who had promulgated 
vague notions about a new social and political or- 
der, and had gathered about him a considerable fol- 
lowing. It was a pity that he had to be taken seri- 
ously, indeed the Governor had tried to save him 
from the consequences of his own indiscretion, but 
then, you know, the laws concerning sedition are very 
stringent, and none of these laws take much account 
of persons or motives, and so the poor man blundered 
to his fate. It is a pity. So the official world would 
have answered. The religious world explained that 



IMMORAL SALVATION 23 

this was a very pestilent and dangerous fellow. He 
was utterly without reverence, jested about our most 
hallowed and long established institutions, spoke scur- 
rilous abuse of priests and dignitaries, held and 
taught loose and dangerous notions about God and 
religion, broke the holy sabbath day, told the rabble, 
for instance, that harlots and tax farmers were more 
worthy people than even magistrates and clerics. He 
was a dangerous demagogue, all the more dangerous 
because of his strangely attractive personality and 
the diabolic charm of his eloquence. Something had 
to be done with him. Even though no specific charge 
could well be brought against him, it was better that 
he should be put out of the way than that the whole 
people should be jeopardized. He was leading them 
inevitably to anarchy, atheism, and rebellion. He 
has simply come to the end that such men always 
reach. 

The crowd that seethed around the spear points 
which ringed the bloody square, and mocked at the 
man upon the middle cross, explained that he was 
an exposed fraud and imposter, that he had deluded 
them with glittering promises about a new Kingdom 
he was to inaugurate, a kingdom in which there 
should have been no rich and no poor, where all 
should have share and share alike, a kingdom the 
least of whose citizens should sit on thrones judging 
the peoples, a kingdom in which all should be priests 
and kings, in which every sick and ailing one would 
have his ills cured by magic, where would be no op- 



^4 CHRISTIANITY 

pression, toil, or poverty. All these things he prom- 
ised, and now he has shown himself unable to save 
his own back from the scourge or his own body from 
the cross. We are delighted that he has been found 
out. 

A few timid and terrified friends who knew him 
best looked on from a safe distance, broken-hearted. 
Here was the truest and noblest man they had ever 
known or imagined. He had steadfastly set his face 
toward righteousness, he had told the truth to priest 
and publican alike, he had led his friends near to 
God, his speech had been as the speech of an angel ; 
he had been pure and sweet and lovable beyond tell- 
ing; they had even hoped that it was he who should 
redeem Israel. But somehow he had managed to 
excite the hostility of all the powers, he had been 
injudicious and careless about offending, he had said 
things about himself which when misinterpreted had 
the color of blasphemy. Now all these hateful forces 
had closed about him and brought him to an ig- 
nominious and horrible death. And they looked him a 
despairing and final farewell. 

A single mercenary of the legion, leaning indif- 
ferently with arms folded about the shaft of his 
spear, heard the broken sentences which fell from 
the dying man's bloody lips, marked his bearing, dig- 
nified even in his extremity, and muttered to himself 
that this time at any rate the law had miscarried, 
this man was surely innocent. 

This is what the spectators saw, — and this is aU 



IMMORAL SALVATION 25 

they saw, — a middle-aged man was being crucified. 
When he was dead they went their ways, having seen 
all there was to see. 

But for many centuries myriads of Christian eyes 
have converged upon the same scene, and have dis- 
cerned in it, or believe that they have seen in it, a 
thing which was not visible to the lookers. To their 
eyes the Cross has been transformed into an Altar; 
the Man has been transmuted to a Lamb ; the crucified 
Galilean has become a Great High Priest; the 
soldier with stained spear has become an unsuspect- 
ing Levite; the gushing blood has become ethereal- 
ized into smoke ascending to the gratified nostrils of 
an angry God; the turbid crowd have become, all 
unconscious, the beneficiaries of a Sacrifice offered 
under the dome of heaven for all the inhabitants of 
earth. 

May the event in history be thus construed.? Is 
this the true interpretation of that great tragedy? 
If not, what will explain the rise and vogue of the 
strange and ghastly fiction? We cannot disguise the 
situation. If this interpretation be not true to real- 
ity we must deny one of the most widely current and 
generally accepted notions about Christ and his place 
in the scheme of things. I say accepted rather than 
believed, for when the notion is plainly stated in 
terms with which the understanding can deal, its 
intrinsic incoherence and its ethical monstrosity must 
compel its rejection. Nevertheless, it remains as an 
idol of the imagination before which generations have 



26 CHRISTIANITY 

prostrated themselves, and whose grim hideousness 
is hid from the devotees by the smoke of their own 
incense. Of all the conceptions actually existent 
within Christendom this is probably the most widely 
diffused. Most Christians indeed would be likely to 
aver that underlying all their doctrinal and ecclesi- 
astical disagreements they are at one in what they 
would call the fundamental belief that Christ was a 
Sacrifice offered to appease the anger of an outraged 
God, and that it has been so far efficacious that it 
has left God with no valid claim against any man who 
will take the proper steps to interpose this safe- 
guard between God's judgments and himself. 

" O tree of glory, tree most fair. 
Ordained those holy limbs to bear, 
How bright in purple robe it stood. 
The purple of a Saviour's blood. 

" Upon its arms, like balance true. 
He weighed the price from sinners due. 
The price which none but he could pay, 
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey ". 

It is the burden of the Roman Mass and the Halle- 
lujah lassie's exhortation, of the revivalist's hymns 
and the cultus of the Sacred Heart. It is the gloomy 
theme of mediaeval art, hangs darkly about the 
stained glass of cathedral windows, is enshrined in a 
myriad pyxes, is what the wayfaring man takes to be 
the central article of the Christian creed. 

The Greek Church saj^s, " He has done and suf- 



IMMORAL SALVATION 27 

fered In our stead all that was necessary for the re- 
mission of our sins ". 

The Roman Church says, " It was a sacrifice most 
acceptable unto God, offered by his Son on the altar 
of the cross, which entirely appeased the wrath and 
indignation of the Father ". 

The Westminster Confession says, " The Lord 
Jesus by his perfect sacrifice of himself hath fully 
satisfied the justice of his Father, and hath purchased 
reconciliation and entrance into the Kingdom of 
Heaven for all whom his Father hath given him ". 

The two conceptions upon which the dogma rests 
are, appeasement of an angry God by pain ; and sub- 
stitution of a victim in the room and stead of an 
offender. We must hold the dogma to its real and 
intended meaning. For a notable tendency is evident 
in contemporary orthodoxy to retain the terms of 
the doctrine while throwing overboard its contents. 
It has begun to be realized in many quarters that both 
its ethical conception of God and its moral estimate 
of man are unworthy. But the attempt is being made 
to save that sacrosanct thing called " sacrifice " by 
giving it an exalted and unnatural meaning. This 
must not be allowed. It has been held before the 
world for ages as the true interpretation and present- 
ment of the essential meaning of Christ. If it be 
not true it ought to be cast out as an intruder within 
the holy place. Propitiation of God by sacrifice, and 
the transference of righteousness from the innocent 
to the guilty, arc of the very essence of it. These 



28 CHRISTIANITY 

are both survivals from ancient paganism. To up- 
root them was the purpose of Judaism and Chris- 
tianity. Judaism failed, and perished through being 
itself slowly transformed into idolatry. Christianity 
has been saved thus far from a like failure only be- 
cause it has within it the living Christ. But the time 
must come, and ought not to be far distant, when his 
work among men will be represented in terms and 
images freed from the taint of an outgrown sav- 
agery. 

Propitiatory sacrifice belongs at a stage of devel- 
opment through which all peoples pass. At that 
stage God and the devil for them are one. They 
suspect themselves to be in the presence of unseen 
powers which are able to help or hurt. Their gods 
are even such as they themselves are. If they are 
unwilling they can be bribed; if they are angry they 
can be appeased by presents. The African savage 
offers his demon a goat, the South Sea Islander 
placates his god with a plantain or a fish, the Phoe- 
nician mother bums her babe to appease Moloch, the 
Mexican priest tears the heart from a comely youth 
and holds it dripping toward the heavens. It is to 
avert the anger or to bribe the good offices of a god. 
At a later point the " scapegoat " idea enters. 
Every year at the Thurgelia the Athenians dragged 
a man and a maid to the brink of the Acropolis and 
hurled them to death that they might bear away a 
year's sins from the city of the Violet Crown. Ro- 
mans threw their victims from the Tarpeian Rock to 



IMMORAL SALVATION 29 

the same end. In Babylon a young man was crucified 
at the summer solstice to bear away the sins of the 
people. 

It has been a fond device of theology to interpret 
all these cruel customs as unconscious prophecies of 
the Great Sacrifice to be made at the right time for 
the sins of the whole world, — as but fragmentary 
shadows of the Cross flung backward along the dim 
pathway of human history. Especially has this 
sanction been claimed for the bloody rites of Israel. 
This claim is utterly without support. The whole 
weight of evolutionary science and ordered history 
is against it. These phenomena are coming to be 
more and more intelligible, and indeed to have a worth 
of their own, but this is because they are seen to be 
the natural and spontaneous expression of religion 
at a stage of evolution where men are otherwise ig- 
norant and brutal. They bear the same relation to 
the religion of Christ as do the crude moral judg- 
ments of savage man to the morality of Jesus. But 
the attempt to interpret him in terms of primitive 
cult is to shut up the sun of righteousness in tro- 
glodytic caves. 

Nor ought we to be any longer misled to believe 
that the institutes of Moses and the Levitical Sys- 
tem bear any different relation to Christ. The Sacri- 
ficial System was no institute of Moses, either with 
or without divine sanction. What that great re- 
ligious master did in the region of worship was the 
counterpart of what he effected in the sphere of law. 



30 CHRISTIANITY 

When, for example, he fixed the law of retaliation at 
" an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ", he was 
not establishing a code of vengeance. On the con- 
trary, he was confining within the narrowest compass 
possible a custom of vengeance universally prevalent. 
It was an immeasurable gain over what went before 
to limit the thirst of revenge within the bounds of 
a rough-and-ready equity. The avenger must not 
hurt the victim more than he himself had been 
wronged. The whole Mosaic code was, moreover, 
wonderfully designated to eliminate those " wild jus- 
tices " which at the time it could do no more than 
restrain. So with Sacrifice. It was an ethnic custom, 
universal, extravagant, cruel. The backward people 
whom Moses led knew no other mode in which to 
express their piety. What he did was to limit the 
custom within the narrowest bounds possible at the 
time and place. He did not pronounce it good, nor 
did he contemplate its perpetuity. His successors, 
the prophets, ceaselessly strove to give the everj^-day 
devotion of the people a higher and more reasonable 
direction. Their ideal was never the culmination 
and crowning of the custom in a victim whose value 
would be absolute and pain infinite. They looked for 
the custom, and the conception of God upon which 
it rested, to perish and be left behind. 

They declare again and again that it was a wor- 
ship distasteful to the Almighty. The history of 
Israel is as simple as it is melancholy. The Prophets 
and the Hierarchy strove together throughout its 



IMMORAL SALVATION 31 

course. Finally the voice of the prophet ceased and 
the priest remained in possession. Five centuries be- 
fore Christ that System which was not of Moses, but 
elaborated in pagan Babylon, was set up in all its 
gorgeous barbarity, and from that time on the moral 
declension of the Hebrews was steady and inexorable. 
Religion was for them the placation of God by gifts ; 
holiness was a ceremonial cleanliness with no moral 
quality. The prophet cried in vain his " thus saith 
the Lord, to what purpose is the multitude of your 
sacrifices to me? I om surfeited with the burnt of- 
ferings of rams and the fat of fed beasts, and I de- 
light not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or of 
he goats. Who hath required this at your hands 
when you come to tread my courts " ? It was a re- 
ligion of the shambles and the medicine-man, and 
broke itself to pieces against the Son of Man. 

And yet within three centuries of his crucifixion we 
find this ancient idol enthroned upon the altar of 
the Christian Church. What will explain or account 
for this hideous changeling in the holy cradle? How 
comes it that the God of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
Christ became identified with INIoloch, and the Babe 
of Bethlehem with the child of a Pliilistine woman? 
That the cross was interpreted to the conscience in 
terms intelligible only to Levites and Shamans? It 
is alas, only too easy to account for it. But before 
entering upon the task to explain the presence of 
this misconception of Christ's work it would be well, 
if possible, to estimate the mischief it has wrought. 



S2 CHRISTIANITY 

Probably most Christian ministers will agree that it 
is growing increasingly difficult for them to gain a 
hearing for their Gospel. They will agree also that 
those most difficult to win are the good men rather 
than the bad ones. The late Professor Bruce, whose 
orthodoxy none will question, has left on record these 
strange words, " I am disposed to think that a great 
and increasing portion of the moral worth of society 
lies outside the Christian Church, separated from it 
not by godlessness, but rather by exceptionally in- 
tense moral earnestness. Many, in fact, have left 
the Church in order to be Christians ". 

The reasons commonly assigned for this arrest in 
the progress of Christianity are no doubt real rea- 
sons. They are such as, the enormous increase in 
material progress and luxury; the bewildering ad- 
vance in human knowledge; the restless commercial 
activity which marks the epoch; the domination of 
the physical sciences; the stubborn moral obtuseness 
of the masses, and such like. But over against these 
stand the facts that the intellectual activity and 
scepticism of the Western world of to-day is proba- 
bly far less than that of the Greek world to which 
the Apostles preached ; that the luxury and self-indul- 
gence which encompass the Church to-day is not a 
circumstance compared with that of the Roman 
world of the Caesars; that the moral darkness of 
society in our time is light itself by contrast with 
the world in which primitive Christianity won its 
triumphs. 



iMMORAL SALVATION 33 

But there is this difference: the religion which 
the Apostles preached was one whose moral ideas 
commanded the homage of all whose souls it touched. 
This remained true for centuries, even after the 
bleeding Christ became its symbol. Low and un- 
worthy as was the plan of salvation offered ta the 
Gauls and Franks, the Lombards and Northmen, it 
was still immeasurably above the ethical standards 
of their own religions. It is a commonplace of his- 
torical reflection that during late centuries mission- 
ary zeal has accomplished smaller triumphs than 
during the first centuries or in the Middle Ages. No 
people has been converted to Christianity for a thou- 
sand years. There are, no doubt, many explanations 
of this. But there is one which the Christian man 
cannot contemplate without pain. It is that the 
moral ideals of men have overtaken and passed above 
and beyond those contained in the popular presenta- 
tions of Christianity. Endless labor has been ex- 
pended to remove the intellectual obstacles in the 
way. Is it time to remind ourselves that the real 
difficulties are moral ones ? Not unworthy Christians 
alone, but an unworthy Christ is the stumbling-block. 
It is the bald fact that the dogma of the propitiatory 
sacrifice of Christ, which has for so long been ex- 
hibited as the central truth of Christianity, is now 
rejected by a society whose moral sense has outgrown 
it. The whole scheme of which it forms the base is 
felt to be immoral as well as untrue. 

The average man of to-day does not believe that 



34 CHRISTIANITY 

human nature is but the moral wreck and debris of 
an Edenic man. He refuses to believe that guilt is 
hereditary in any sense, though he knows well that 
sin is. He believes that the law against the attainder 
of blood is written in the constitution of the uni- 
verse. He will not believe that a course of action 
which would be wrong for a man can be right for 
God. The human idea of justice demands that the 
penalty shall fall upon the person who offends and 
not upon some one in his stead, even though the 
sovereign furnish the victim and the substitute be ever 
so willing. At a certain stage of moral advancement 
Zaleucus, king of the Locrians, could be admired and 
revered. His law required that the adulterer should 
lose his eyes. When his own son was convicted of 
the offence, his father, to save the sanctity of the 
law and at the same time allow his love to act, com- 
manded that one of his son's eyes and one of his own 
should be pulled out. The world of that day looked 
upon Zaleucus as a miracle of goodness; the world 
of to-day can see in him only a fond and foolish 
tyrant. 

Religious thought no longer moves among govern- 
mental ideas and legal fictions. It has become bio- 
logical. In the processes of the spirit the watchwords 
are not justification, but development; not salvation, 
but character; its antitheses are not acquittal and 
condemnation, but living and perishing. It is known 
that hereditary evil is a force which works within 
the life, and not a penal inheritance passed down 



IMMORAL SALVATION 65 

from an ancestor. It believes that righteousness is 
salvation, and that nothing else can be. It believes 
that righteousness in men is the wish of God, and 
that it always was his wish, and they do not believe 
that there is now or ever was in the nature or statutes 
of God any obstacle which had first to be overcome 
before men could be peraiitted to begin to be good, 
or in order that God might think their goodness 
good. To a world at this stage " vicarious " re- 
demption cannot be preached. They will not accept 
it at any price. If they be still assured that this is 
really God's method, they will answer with John 
Stuart Mill, " I will call no being good who is not 
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow- 
man; and if such a being can sentence me to hell 
for not so calling him, to hell I will go ". 

The well-meant attempts to find analogies to the 
doctrine in the experiences of life are rejected by 
the intelligence and the conscience alike. Every one 
knows that the good and innocent are always suffer- 
ing for the faults of the bad. But every one knows 
also that this suffering does not lessen but increases 
the blame for the one who takes advantage from the 
pain. Every martyr of a holy cause sacrifices him- 
self deliberately, but that does not render innocent 
the multitude who stone him. The mother starves 
herself that her children may eat; the engineer goes 
down to death with his hand on the reverse lever that 
the passengers may be saved; the merchant pays his 
friend's debts to save his friend's good name. But 



36 CHRISTIANITY 

none of these have anything in common with that 
interpretation of Christ's sufferings which we de- 
nounce. In none of these things is there anything 
like a transference of moral status or an " imputa- 
tion " of righteousness. They are all, indeed, gath- 
ered up within that eternal cross-bearing which is 
the concomitant of loving. In the heart of their 
blessed company is indeed the eternal Soldier, Martyr, 
Mother-soul, who was crucified in God before the 
world was. But they have nothing in common with 
a victim bound upon an altar and immolated by a 
priest. 

Could any two conceptions be more utterly contra- 
dictory than the classic sayings of Jesus, " If any man 
would be my disciple let him deny himself and take 
up his cross and follow me. Not every man who 
sayeth unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the king- 
dom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my 
Father who is in heaven ", and the classic hymn, 

" Rock of Ages, cleft for me. 
Let me hide myself in thee; 
Let the water and the blood 
From thy side, a healing flood. 
Be of sin the double cure. 
Save from guilt and make me pure. 

" Should my tears forever flow, 
Should my zeal no languor know. 
All for sin could not atone, 
Thou must save and thou alone; 
In my hand no price I bring, 
Simply to thy cross I cling " ? 



IMMORAL SALVATION 37 

In popular speech the content of the dogma in 
question is expressed by the term " Redemption ". 
The word means to buy off or to buy back. It is a 
commercial term. The captive held by Barbary 
pirates or Sicilian brigands is bought and set free. 
The Order of Redemptorists took its name from this. 
They were redeemers. In Teutonic custom the con- 
victed felon could compound for a price, so much for 
a limb, so much for an eye, so much for a life. But 
in what do these resemble the action of Bishop Bien- 
venue which warranted him in saying to Jean Valjean, 
"You are mine; I have bought you"? or that on 
account of which the Apostle could say, " Ye are 
not your own ; ye are bought with a price "? Christ's 
blood a ransom paid to the devil, as was for long 
maintained? A price to an angry God to allay his 
fury? The satisfaction of a bond held by an al- 
mighty Shylock? Each and every one of these con- 
tentions has been maintained by grave and respecta- 
ble systemizers. Augustine, Anselm, Luther, Calvin. 
These are great names. They have laid their hands 
upon the souls of millions, dead and living. Sin- 
cerely believing that they were preaching Christ, they 
have propagated a gloomy paganism which has gone 
far to render the cross of Christ of none effect. 

It avails not to be told that these gross concep- 
tions are misrepresentations and caricatures of the 
doctrine of the Atonement as actually held and 
taught by intelligent and well-informed Christians. 
They are not caricatures ; they are photographs. 



38 CHRISTIANITY 

Nor will it serve to say, with the late Archbishop 
Magee, that, " so far as they have any color of 
plausibility they rest upon the impassioned rhetoric 
of the pulpit and the hymn-book ". Even if this 
were so it must be remembered that the pulpit and 
the hymn-book are the accredited vehicles upon which 
religious teaching is borne to the people. If their 
burden is a false one it will be rightly taken for the 
real one. No ; what the Archbishop truly calls " this 
reversion to the worst ideas of pagan sacrifice, savor- 
ing of the heathen temple and reeking of blood ", is 
woven into the very fabric of Confessions, Articles, 
and Liturgies. It is seriously defended by scientific 
theology and has the imprimatur of the organized 
Church. 

We return now to the question of how to account 
for the existence and persistence of a presentation of 
Christ which the moral sense rejects. I have said 
that it is only too easy to account for, and so it is, so 
far as concerns the historic law which operates in such 
a case. As in commerce a debased currency alwaj^s 
tends to drive a precious one out of circulation, so in 
philosophy and religion a low conception can hold 
the field long against a noble one. This is what has 
occurred in the Christian kingdom. But this brings 
us to the place where we should discover when, and 
where, and how, the spiritual currency of Christ be- 
came thus debased; when and how his coin came to 
be stamped on one side with a sacrificial bull, and 
on the other with a mitred priest. 



IMMORAL SALVATION 39 

To begin with, let us ask the plain question, — Did 
Jesus conceive of himself as a propitiatory sacrifice, 
or of his work as an expiation? The only answer 
possible is, Clearly he did not. With the exception of 
two phrases attributed to him, and which we will 
look at more carefully after a little, there is not the 
shadow of a suggestion that such an idea ever en- 
tered his mind. And there is everything in his life 
to show that the whole circle of ideas in which this 
conception is imbedded was abhorrent to him. It is 
true that the record of his teaching is fragmentary 
and incomplete, but there is quite enough in the Gos- 
pels to show what he believed himself to be, and to 
be doing. If the primal and controlling purpose of 
his existence had been to propitiate the wrath of God 
by means of a painful life and death, surely he would 
somewhere have said so. But it is the one thing 
which he does not say. He has much to say about 
himself and his mission. He calls himself a Light, 
to reveal God and illuminate the dark places of life. 
He is a Shepherd, leading a flock, guarding it against 
rapacious beasts, feeding it, seeking the mavericks, 
carrying the lambs in his bosom. He is a Physician, 
diagnosing the ills of men, precribing medicaments 
for their cure, laying balm upon their sores. He is 
a Tribune of the people, disturbing the world's dull 
and ignoble peace, setting a man at variance against 
his father, and the daughter against the mother. He 
is Bread, wholesome for the soul's food, and needful 
to sustain the soul's life. He is Water, to assuage 



40 CHRISTIANITY 

the soul's thirst and lave the heart's fever. He is 
Leaven, to stir the ferment in the world's sodden 
lump which shall save it from decay. He is Salt, 
to keep the world wholesome. He is the Vine, the 
Door, the Strong Man, the Bridegroom, the Judge. 
But he does not call himself the Victim or the Priest. 

That he expected and intended to die, is plain 
enough. But he nowhere placed upon his suffering 
and death the interpretation which it afterward 
came to bear. In all his sayings which have been 
preserved, he gives the clear impression that he took 
his privation and pain and death as being " in the 
day's work ", incidental and unavoidable necessities 
of the task which he had undertaken, but not as the 
task itself. They were the price which he had to pay 
for being what he was. But there is no intimation 
that he attributed to them any sacrificial or propi- 
tiatory value. 

To the above statement there are just two ex- 
ceptions. What we have to say about them may 
best be introduced by showing them in their context. 

"Then came to him the mother of Zebedee's children with 
her sons, worshipping, and desiring a certain thing of him. 
And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith. Grant 
that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right, and 
the other on thy left in thy kingdom. But Jesus answered 
and said unto her, Ye know not what ye ask. . . . The 
princes of the gentiles exercise dominion, and they tliat are 
great exercise authority. But it shall not be so among you; 
but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your 
minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him 



IMMORAL SALVATION 41 

be your servant; even as the Son of man came, not to be 
ministered to but to minister; and to give his life a ransom 
for many "; 

and 

"And as they were eating Jesus took bread and blessed it 
and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, saying. Take; eat; this 
is my body. And he took the cup and gave thanks, and gave it 
to them saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of 
the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission 
of sins ", 

The significant phrases are those in italics, " to 
give his life a ransom ", and " blood shed for the 
remission of sins ". Now, let it be well kept in mind 
that these are the only sayings attributed to Jesus 
which give any color to the contention that he re- 
garded himself in the light of a propitiatory sacri- 
fice. And let it be further remembered that they 
are not only foreign to but directly opposed to the 
whole tenor of his teachings. But they are quite 
in keeping with a theory concerning Christ which grew 
up during the fifty years between his death and the 
time when the Gospels were written. Within that 
period arose the Gospel of the Infancy; the circum- 
stantial but contradictory accounts of the Resur- 
rection ; the twisting of the events of his Hfe to fit the 
requirements of Hebrew prophecy. All these later 
ideas were antedated in the written Gospels. In the 
phrases before us it would seem that we have an in- 
stance of the same thing done in the interest of theol- 
ogy. In each case the context shows plainly that the 
phrases are foreign to the matter in hand. Jesus' 



42 CHRISTIANITY 

argument is in each case complete without them. 
One cannot but feel that they do not belong there. 
The Gospels are conversations and traditions com- 
mitted to writing fifty years after the event. If 
during that time a theory concerning the Master's 
life and work gained currency we may expect that 
it would show itself in shaping the written story. 
That such a theory did become elaborated during that 
period we shall see. It appears more reasonable, 
therefore, to believe that the two phrases " ransom " 
and " remission " are placed in Jesus' mouth by a 
later tradition than that they were used by him, and 
intended to present a conception of himself which 
is irreconcilable with his own plain words. 

The Acts of the Apostles contain the only record 
we have of the terms in which the earliest ambassadors 
of Jesus presented his Gospel. The book gives a 
brief but coherent resume of four speeches by St. 
Peter at Jerusalem and one at Cseserea ; a conversa- 
tion of St. Philip; a long speech of Stephen; the 
proceedings and discussions of a Council; and a 
dozen speeches of St. Paul, delivered at various 
places, and to all sorts and conditions of people. In 
it we have Christ interpreted by his earliest inter- 
preters. Here, if anywhere, wx ought to be able to 
discern what the men commissioned by himself to 
present him actually thought about him. Now the 
significant fact is that not until we meet the very 
latest speeches of St. Paul do we meet the intimation 
that his suffering and death had any sacrificial value. 



IMMORAL SALVATION 43 

It is true that phrases occur upon which that inter- 
pretation has been put, but it is equally plain that the 
interpretation is a shadow thrown backward from a 
later time. By the evangelic and catholic theologian 
their discourses must needs be pronounced lacking in 
the vital and essential element of the Gospel of Christ. 
It is to the wonderful man Paul that the world owes 
the first coherent rationale of Jesus' career. The 
group of immediate personal friends who survived 
the Master were neither in the mood, nor were they 
the type of men, to set down in reasoned form the 
experience which had transformed their lives. They 
were still under the spell of his compelling person- 
ality, and they were overwhelmed by the new-found 
hope of immortality brought to them by his appear- 
ance after his death. The hope made new men of them 
and they were confident it would do the same for all 
who should hear of it. They preached the " Gospel 
of the Resurrection ". And so did Paul, more force- 
fully than they all. For a time he preached nothing 
else. But presently he began to reason upon what 
lay behind the new-bom hope. He therefore found 
in the " Expiation " a gi'ound cleared for the Resur- 
rection. Little by little the emphasis is transferred 
from the Resurrection to the Crucifixion. Then more 
and more the Crucifixion is identified with the Hebrew 
and ethnic conception of Sacrifice. Finally the Resur- 
rection falls into the background, and his thoughts 
take on a crimson hue. Three interpretations of 
Christ lie superimposed in his s^^stem, biological, 



44 CHRISTIANITY 

legal, sacrificial, but in the end the last comes to 
dominate. 

It is not surprising that this interpretation gained 
currency. The early Christians, whether Roman, 
Greek, or Jew, came to the new religion with precon- 
ceptions and habits of thought already formed. It is 
not possible for any one anywhere to disentangle 
himself from old beliefs while he takes in new truth. 
The most he can do is to readjust such of his old 
convictions as lie in immediate contact with the new 
one. But underneath these there is the whole con- 
tents of his mind. The new truth sinks down among 
these, and is colored by them while it transforms 
them. When he attempts to utter new truth he can 
only do it in language and imagery which he already 
possesses. It requires long time for the new idea 
either to work over the old ideas to its uses, or to 
escape from them altogether by building up a new 
imagery about itself. The truth of Christ could not 
escape these inevitable conditions. He lived and died 
in Judea, under Roman law, and his life was construed 
by Roman Jews. In being transmitted through their 
minds it received a coloring which it still retains. 
The Great Surrender was pictured in Levitical terms. 
The Light of the world shone out through the stained 
window of the temple at Jerusalem. This refraction 
and discoloration must be allowed for by a world 
which would see the Sun in his glory. Paul, a Roman 
citizen as well as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, min- 
gled his pigments in colors borne from Roman law 



IMMORAL SALVATION 45 

and Hebrew sacrifice. One could as well constnict 
a zoology as a gospel in these terms. Christian 
thought has been bewildered and Christian instinct 
wellnigh defeated by this logically coherent but empty 
scheme. Christ's terms are biological ; this one's are 
legal. And Christianity is essentially a life process 
and not a commercial transaction. 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 



" It is indeed a strange and significant thing: so much 
speculation about Christ, so little earnest inquiry into 
his actual mind; so much knowledge of what the creeds 
or confessions,, the liturgies or psalmodies of the Church 
said; so little knowledge of the historical person or con- 
struction of the original documents. It is still more sig- 
nificant that the men most intent on the revival of reli- 
gion through the revival of the Church were the very 
men who seemed least to conceive the need of the return 
to Christ. They were possessed to find and restore the 
Church of the Fathers, and to the Fathers they ap- 
pealed; but there is no suggestion that Christ as the 
founder supplied the determinative idea of his own 
Church ". — Fairbairn. 



Ill 

THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 

If, then, the interpretation of Jesus which we have 
just examined be dismissed as an offence at once to 
the intelligence and the conscience, what then is his 
real role in the drama of humanity? To this, I reply 
as follows: — Christianity takes its rise not from the 
life or the death of Jesus, but from his " resurrec- 
tion ". It was not until after that event that his 
personality assumed any world-wide significance. If 
that had not taken place, his life, assuming it to have 
been otherwise exactly as recorded, would not have 
been of significance. It would have been strange and 
that is all. He would no doubt have held place in 
human memory only as a greater Confucius or Soc- 
rates. It was the " man risen from the dead " who 
arrested the world's attention, and it noticed him 
solely on that account. 

Let me say here that if any one chooses to take the 
position that the alleged occurrence is so inherently 
incredible and impossible that even to consider it is 
folly, I have nothing to say to him, except something 
like this: — ^We realize as fully as you do that it is 
contrary to all human experience, and that probably 

49 



50 CHRISTIANITY 

no amount of evidence would establish it at the bar 
of science. But we realize also that human experi- 
ence is not final. What you and we alike call the 
" order of Nature " is^ after all, no more or less than 
God's routine way of doing things. It has no dynamic 
in itself. It can neither cause nor hinder. It is at 
least possible that in the experience of a race a 
critical point may be reached where something out 
of the common ought to happen. If so we may be 
sure it will happen. All that can be said against 
the event in question is that it stands alone and iso- 
lated among phenomena. What then? Cannot a 
fact be a fact until there be another like it.^^ As to 
this fact we contend there is abundant reason for its 
being. There is also reason to believe that it does 
not stand alone. 

The essential nature of the fact has been long 
obscured by a crowd of pious imaginations which 
have overlaid it. Let it be plainly stated that there 
is here no question of the resuscitation of a man who 
was dead. It is not a question of a body but of a 
spirit. The body which hung upon the cross was 
laid in the tomb, and no doubt stayed there. The 
late stories in the Gospels of the empty tomb, the 
earthquake, the great stone, the angelic appearances, 
and so on, are so contradictory as to be irreconcila- 
ble. They were not written, in any case, until fifty 
years after the occurrence, after every contemporary 
was dead. Like the prodigies of the Infancy, they ap- 
pear to be the product of a naive piety which thought 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 51 

to make the birth, life, death, and resurrection of their 
dear Lord more credible by gathering about them 
the marvels which were to that age the kind of evi- 
dence which told most. For our time such " evi- 
dence " is only an embarrassment. And there is no 
need for it. To prove that Jesus appeared to sundry 
persons after his death it is of no consequence 
whether his tomb was empty or filled. The affair 
does not concern the body, but that, whatever it is, 
which survives the body. No police examination of 
a grave can affect the case. It is reported that the 
late Professor James promised that he would, if pos- 
sible, show himself after his death to certain of his 
friends. Suppose his promise to have been fulfilled, 
is it conceivable that they would have thought of 
testing the reality of his appearance by an inspec- 
tion of his grave? They would not look for a body. 
All that they would demand would be to be able to 
identify the thing which should appear with their 
friend who had died. 

What it was that St. Paul saw on the Damascus 
road, that Mary Magdalene saw in the garden, that 
the two disciples saw on the road to Emmaus, that 
sundry friends of the dead Jesus saw at different 
times, who can say? The grosser accretions to their 
story which have crept later into the Gospels, only 
becloud the reality. The heart of the matter is that 
they saw something which transformed their despair 
into confidence, their grief into rejoicing, and 
through them brought into humanity a conception 



52 CHRISTIANITY 

of human life which has transformed the world. This 
something is the Resurrection. 

The point in Jesus' career at which he comes into 
relation with all human life is after he had died and 
was alive again. Even his disciples who had known 
him most intimately were obliged to make his ac- 
quaintance anew. He whom we seek to know is not 
the historical personage localized in a Roman prov- 
ince in the time of any Caesar, but the transcendental 
personage, of infinitely " wide discourse, looking be- 
fore and after ". The cry " back to Jesus " which 
has arisen sporadically at so many places in Chris- 
tendom of late years, voices a real and justifiable 
longing. It expresses the impatient feeling that 
Christ has in some way been lost in Christianity ; that 
he has been overlaid and hidden within theological 
definitions, thrust out of sight behind ecclesiastical 
organizations, silenced amid the strife of tongues. It 
is certainly true that something has interposed be- 
tween Christ and the great world. A religion that 
he meant to be so plain that the wayfaring man might 
not err therein, has come to be regarded as complex, 
abstruse, obscure. 

But while this longing is intelligible and praise- 
worthy, one is bound to acknowledge that it is miss- 
ing its aim. The fact is, the pilgrims have gone 
back in search of the wrong Christ. During the last 
half century a wealth of learning, labor, and even 
genius have been expended in the attempt to repro- 
duce the historic personage and make him real. The 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 53 

Holy Land has been explored, studied, photographed, 
in its minutest detail. The naive story in the Gospels 
has been drawn out into " Lives of Christ " by the 
score. His antecedents have been traced in Jewish 
heredity. His dress, food, manners, speech, sur- 
roundings, have been reconstructed with infinite de- 
votion, and no doubt, with substantial accuracy. 
More information concerning the setting of his life 
is taught every day in mission Sunday schools than 
Athanasius or Paul possessed. But when all is done 
the earnest man is not much less bewildered and 
hopeless among these antiquaries than was his an- 
cestors among fine-spun theologies. They cannot see 
the forest for the trees. 

The life of the man Jesus does become of absorb- 
ing interest, but only in its proper order and for its 
proper purpose. Not until the " risen " Christ en- 
gaged the world's attention did it even try to re- 
member, much less to record the story, of his life. 
Then the devotion of a too creative memory recorded 
too much. But the belief in it has, in sober verity, 
wrought the most momentous result in human his- 
tory. It transformed man's estimate of himself and 
of God. The fact was the essential content of the 
Apostle's evangel. Their message was not atonement, 
or redemption, or heaven or hell, but the announce- 
ment that a good man had been identified by them 
alive, after they had seen him dead and buried, and 
that he had assured them that the same possibility was 
open to any man who would seek it in the right way. 



54 CHRISTIANITY 

Those who could comprehend the " good news " wel- 
comed it with the same kind of awed enthusiasm as 
would one to-day who should be offered a means of 
adding fifty, a hundred, a thousand years to his nat- 
ural life. Their argument was that Jesus had made 
an experiment in human living, and had demonstrated 
in his own person that death need not defeat life, 
and that he had become a kind of first-fruits of an 
immortal harvest which might be abundant if men 
so chose. It is no doubt quite impossible for us to 
whom this is no longer news to understand with 
what eagerness this message was hailed, or how over- 
whelmingly it took possession of the minds and im- 
aginations of men who before had no expectation of 
future life of any kind. Indeed the fear of death 
and hopelessness in its presence is a characteristic 
of the ancient world. Lucretius and Cicero in vain 
wrote labored treatises to reason its terrors away. 
The epitaphs on a thousand tombs register the flip- 
pant melancholy or the profound hopelessness of 
their grief for their dead. 

The original appeal of the Gospel was to the su- 
preme aspiration of all living beings, the " lust of 
living ". It is little wonder that the first title ap- 
plied to Christ was the " Lord and Giver of Life ". 
And it is as little wonder that the appeal was so im- 
measurably more successful than the sordid one to 
the fear of damnation which has been made for now 
these so many centuries ! 

But having come so far we must now face the ques- 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 55 

tion : — What and who was and is the Christ whom we 
believe to be superhuman? The first converts appar- 
ently made little or no effort to estimate his nature. 
They were content to take the Gospel as it was prof- 
fered. They believed that if they lived according to 
the " Way " announced they would, like him, survive 
their own deaths. The common notion now current 
that men are naturally immortal in any case was 
unknown to them. They were convinced that by his 
" way " only could they outlast death, and that by 
any other way they would perish out of being. The 
steadfastness of the early Christians in the face of 
obloquy, persecution, and torture has long been a 
gratuitous puzzle to historians. Of all the ingenious 
explanations, marshalled by Gibbon and his like, for 
the marvellous spread of Christianity in the first two 
centuries, this sufficient one is about the only one 
omitted. One may believe that they were mistaken 
in their conviction — ^but wherever one did hold it it 
rendered him proof against all assault. For what 
signified a few days' hunger, or a few hours on the 
cross, or a few moments in the fangs of the lions, so 
long as endurance meant endless existence, and sur- 
render meant falling back into a few years longer of 
life, at best, with annihilation at the end of it? Life 
is not at any time so well worth the living, that one 
could easily be frightened back into it when he had 
the chance to exchange it for one which he believed 
to be far better, and which could not well be worse. 
The scanty allusions to the movement in secular 



56 CHRISTIANITY 

history make it plain that the outside world looked 
upon it as a pitiful delusion. Alternately they ad- 
mired the Christians' fortitude, and were incensed 
at their stubbornness. Meanwhile the belief spread, 
and all weapons against it were impotent. But it was 
not until from forty to sixty years after Jesus' dis- 
appearance that any rationale of this new life for men 
was attempted. Then, first of all, St. Paul under- 
takes the task. He explains however in terms which 
are most difficult to construe. Never was a more 
exasperating expounder than he. He passes from 
scientific precision to vivid metaphor, and thence to 
emotional rhapsody, and round again through the 
same circle, so that one is hard put to it to follow. 
His favorite formulae are something hke these: — ^the 
Christian "is in Christ ", or Christ " is in him " ; or 
both are " bound up together in his dying and rising 
again " ; or " his life is hid with Christ in God " ; and 
such like. Strictly speaking, it is not a rationale 
of the phenomena at all, but endless ways of saying 
that Christ, by his steadfast persistence in his 
" way ", attained to the resurrection of the dead, and 
that any other through the same " way " may attain 
the same goal. 

It is quite plain, however, that the matter could 
not remain in that shape. Human nature always 
craves the reason of things. The Church was now 
numerous and widespread, but it was almost entirely 
of people who knew Jesus only at second hand. The 
spell of his immediate presence had lifted. Who, and 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 57 

what, is this person into whose hands we have com- 
mitted our existence? It is patent that the Gospels 
were written in answer to this demand. To see the 
Christ of the Gospels it is not needful to inquire 
minutely into their date or authorsliip, or about their 
accuracy in details. These are questions for scholar- 
ship, and are in their place important. But the 
main tiling has been settled long ago. Every one 
admits that they are memorabilia, collected generally 
from his contemporaries and sympathetic friends. If 
their portrait of him does not show up his features 
in its bold outlines we might better lay it aside. We 
may also, if we choose, disregard for the present the 
stories of the Infancy. All his followers made his 
acquaintance at first as a grown man. Their opinion 
of him was formed before they thought to inquire con- 
cerning his birth and parentage. 

In the Synoptic Gospels we have the story as it 
was told at the demand of a people who already ac- 
cepted and lived by the fact of the Resurrection. 
Without that belief it would not have been written, 
and without that belief brought to it it would have 
been incredible and unintelligible. All four Gospels 
really begin the story at the same point. They date 
its commencement from the time of a religious 
awakening which had place in Palestine in the 
fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, while Pontius 
Pilate was Procurator of Judea, Annas and Caiaphas 
being High Priests at Jerusalem. The stage was held 
at first by the stem and picturesque prophet, John 



58 CHRISTIANITY 

the " Baptizer ". Then a Jewish carpenter steps to 
the centre, and John makes his exit. The biog- 
raphers thereafter confine themselves to his move- 
ments. This is the original story, and in Mark, the 
oldest, it stands thus. But in each of the other Gos- 
pels to the drama is prefixed a different prologue. 
By Matthew the genealogy of the central character, 
from Abraham down, is hung up against the scenes, 
together with an account of his parentage and birth. 
By Luke a diff'erent genealogy is posted, along with 
a different story of the Infancy. John prefixes a 
divine Prologue, after the manner of the Greek 
tragedies. 

When we study it the problem may be stated thus : 
— What did Jesus conceive himself to be? What did 
he conceive himself to be doing? What did his biog- 
raphers believe him to be? Let us take tliis last in- 
quiry first. It is plain that before they wrote the 
first word they held him to be a man in some way 
apart from common humanity. In this opinion those 
for whom they wrote shared. But just what they did 
hold him to be is not plain. The strong impression 
given is that they did not know. That dogmatic 
certitude, that assumption that everything can be ex- 
haustively stated, is absent from the first three Gos- 
pels, and is only present in the Fourth, which is not 
a biography, but a theological treatise. A certain 
tender hesitation, a reverent doubtfulness, if one may 
say so, marks the attitude of the disciples. That 
feeling is itself, perhaps, the best indication of what 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 59 

they thought about him. Two things manifestly im- 
pressed them chiefly — the marvellous spiritual il- 
lumination of his words, and the marvellous power 
he exhibited in dealing with certain natural forces. 
The first of these is but illy defined as " sinlessness ". 
Faultlessness is but a tame and negative quality, and 
they make but little of it. They represent him as not 
only impeccably good, but dynamically good. The 
wisdom which they remembered in him was not at all 
the wisdom of the sage or the philosopher, but that 
deeper wisdom to which the heart responds. To this 
end they preserve his fugitive sayings, his more 
formal sermons, his parables, his apothegms, his pro- 
found and tender talks with his intimates, his answers 
to inquirers, his retorts to challengers. 

They recount his healing sick persons, restoring 
sight to the blind, strengthening the impotent, cleans- 
ing lepers, and, in one instance, bringing the dead to 
life. The surprising thing is that they were not sur- 
prised. They make no vaunt of these marvels, or of 
him for their sakes. They are frank, on the contrary, 
to record that he thought of these powers but slightly, 
never used them to his own advantage, used them 
at all reluctantly, and always held them subordinate 
to his main purpose. Nothing could be presented 
more unlike the vulgar wonder-worker, an Abognotus 
or a Cagliostro. To them he was plainly not a 
wonder-worker, but a person from whom on other ac- 
counts one might expect marvels. The miracles and 
mighty works do not interrupt the narrative, nor 



60 CHRISTIANITY 

encumber it. They are of the substance of it and 
render it coherent. To the biographers he was at 
least superhuman. But when they were challenged, 
as they were more than once, to speak out what they 
thought of him, they hesitated. Either they were not 
certain, or they had no terms in which to express 
it. Most of them were content to say that he was 
a " prophet ". 

Now, the prophet was a character with whose idea 
they were at home. He was one who, in addition to 
his qualities as a man, possessed certain other en- 
dowments in virtue of which he was able, within lim- 
its, to produce phenomena impossible to other men. 
For a while this formula seemed to be sufficient for 
the case; but before long it was seen to be so mani- 
festly inadequate that it was abandoned. A few 
thought of him as " that Prophet ", i.e., the legendary 
seer and wonder-worker of tradition and religious 
folk-lore. But this notion gained little acceptance. 
It fitted him so illy that it could not cling. There 
was, indeed, extant a character which would describe 
him, but for a long time they hesitated to use it. It 
was that of the Jewish " Messiah ". This was the 
title of a personage held by the Jews in supremest 
reverence, but whose nature and qualities were most 
vague and confused. It is not possible to this day 
to find out with certainty what the Jew means or 
meant by the Messiah. Rabbi gainsays Rabbi, and 
historian disagrees with historian. One thing can be 
said, however, about every presentation of the char- 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 61 

acter. He was to be a person higher than man, and 
lower than God. He possessed some of the attributes 
of both and not all of either, and had immediate 
relations with both. It is not surprising that this 
title was fixed upon Jesus, or that it is the name by 
which, in its Greek form, the Christ, he is known 
to this day. It satisfied better than any other term 
could the immediate craving for a definition. For 
that pui'pose it is indeed inadequate, but it was the 
best and truest available. Nor is damage wrought 
by its use save when ill-informed piety attempts to 
shrink the Son of God within the compass of an old 
Jewish conception. This is the highest point reached 
by the three first Gospels in their interpretation of 
Jesus. He was a " prophet " ; or he was " Elijah " ; 
or he was the " Messiah " ; and beyond this they do 
not go. 

We now ask. What did Jesus think himself to be.'' 
and to be doing? No one reading the Gospels can 
miss seeing that he regarded himself as one who had 
a definite and distinct purpose to accomplish. There 
is no feeling about or waiting upon circumstances. 
Whatever his task was, it is evident that he believed 
that if he did not accomplish it it would never be 
done. 

There are two paths generally open to the great 
and sympathetic soul touched by the world's wrongs. 
One is to teach righteousness, the other is to 
organize righteousness ; to be either a preacher or 
a reformer. Jesus chose neither. He added little or 



62 CHRISTIANITY 

nothing to the world's stock of theoretical morality. 
Probably all his noblest sayings may be matched from 
Socrates or Moses, from Seneca or Gautama. The 
great company of preachers has served the world well, 
but Jesus is not among them. No more did he con- 
ceive his task to be to reform society. God knows, 
the social, political, and economic order among which 
he lived was rotten enough. It was a drunken, lust- 
ful, cruel, and unjust world. The field for a reformer 
was ripe to the harvest. There were laborers ready, 
— not many, but very willing. A crusade might have 
been organized against the palpable wrongs, evils, and 
oppressions of life. Had he put himself at the head 
of it, with his unparalleled powers, inspired it with 
his indomitable courage, inflamed it with his divine 
enthusiasm, one might suppose it would have swept 
east and west from Galilee and cleansed the world. 
Indeed the thought did come to him, and tempted liim 
mightily. All the kingdoms of the earth la^^ open to 
him, but he deliberately turned away from that path. 
If, then, his metier was neither to teach men good- 
ness nor to change their environment, what was it.^* 

Two words dominate all his speech, — " life " and 
" death ". With these two phenomena, which are 
really one, he concerned liimself entirely. His prob- 
lem was, What can be done with the individual exist- 
ence? Can it be happily extended beyond the term 
which we call " natural "? If so, how.? The eternal 
absurdity is that men die. The higher the individual 
rises in the scale of being the more he revolts from 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 63 

the necessity. It puzzles his understanding ; it stulti- 
fies his consciousness. What he really shrinks from 
is not the act of dying nor the fear of anything be- 
yond, but the instinctive horror of being dead, — 

" That sense of ruin which is worse than pain. 
That masterful negation and collapse 
Of all that makes me man; as though I bent 
Over the dizzy brink 
Of some sheer, infinite descent. 
Or worse, as though 

Down, down, forever I was falling through 
The solid framework of created things, 
And needs must sink 
Into the vast abyss ". 

This inescapable horror is the unique experience 
of man. He can disguise it, accept it, jest at it, ig- 
nore it, damn it, according to his mood, but it is, after 
all, the determining force in his action. It increases 
just in proportion as his nature climbs and expands. 
The brute knows it not. The brute-like man is 
touched by it little if at all. But in measure as the 
individual consciousness deepens and expands and en- 
tangles itself with ever extending relationships, it is 
the more oppressed by this brutal surd. 

To this primal instinct of being Jesus addresses 
himself. Whatever he accomplished he effected here. 
His problem and his task were biological. But he 
takes it up at the point where the human biologist 
lays it down. Is the individual life composed of 
such stuff, or does it contain within it such qualities, 



64 CHRISTIANITY 

or can it be moulded to such potencies that it can 
win through the barrier called Death? This is the 
question he asked; and the answer is Christianity; 
and nothing else is. 

At this point a strenuous and sustained effort is 
necessary to empty our thought of some persistent 
misconceptions. It is indeed most difficult for us 
at this day to attach the same meaning which he did 
to the words which he used. In religious phraseology 
the antithesis " living and dying ", " surviving and 
perishing ", " salvation and destruction ", have been 
for so long time used in secondary and metaphorical 
senses that it is hard to realize that in his mouth they 
had their plain and literal significance. His theme 
was not the happiness of two contrasted kinds of 
future existence, but existence itself. Can a man in 
any wise overcome death, and if so, how? Of course 
such an inquiry must lead at times to a point where 
the quality of the new existence comes into considera- 
tion, but this never engages his attention long, and is 
always subordinate to the main theme. 

He pronounces at the outset that the thing is pos- 
sible, but difficult. He introduces it under the cate- 
gory of a " Kingdom ". But the moment that word 
is pronounced we have to be on our guard lest we 
miss its meaning. He uses the term in its biological 
and not its political sense. In other connections we 
are familiar with that use. We speak of the mineral 
Kingdom, the animal Kingdom, the vegetable King- 
dom. In no other sense does he use the word for 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 65 

the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. It is a 
biological classification. Had naturalists and men of 
science formulated Christian theology, instead of 
metaphysicians and jurists, the world would have 
been spared an incalculable confusion. For it is the 
naturalist's legitimate field. But ages ago the truth 
of Christ was interpreted in terms of law instead 
of biology. The result has been that the very words 
of the Master have had fixed upon them an unnatural 
meaning from which it will be long before they re- 
cover. His language, however, is more intelligible 
than it has been at any time in the past. In the 
great cycle of human thought the physical sciences 
have brought into common use the mental forms into 
which his words fit. 

" Except ye be born again ye cannot enter into 
the Kingdom ". This is the heart of Jesus' message. 
But this " being reborn " is, to his view, not a 
metaphor but a scientific statement. Birth is a 
strange thing; it is an epoch in the progress of an 
individual life. It is not the commencement of it. 
The subject of it has reached the end of a stage of 
development before he can be born. The higher in 
the scale of being, the longer and more complete is 
this preliminary stage. Birth is only the entrance 
upon a new phase of being. Jesus does not present 
the new birth as the beginning of the soul, but as 
a radical change in its relationships. It cannot be 
born again until it has been bom once. Nor does 
either the first or the second birth guarantee the 



66 CHRISTIANITY 

continuance in life of the thing bom; it only gives 
it opportunity. His dictum is that there is a Way 
whereby the natural life of an individual creature can 
be so modified as to become endowed with immortal 
quality. The new creatures thus produced — their 
origin, their laws, their phenomena, their fortunes, 
he includes in a new Kingdom. He points out that, 
as might be expected, the entrance into this new 
kingdom differs in essential features from that into 
the kingdom next below. It is difficult to achieve, 
cannot be achieved at all without strenuous effort. 
In this Kingdom the pangs of parturition are borne 
by the child for himself. The gate is strait and the 
path narrow that leadeth into life, and relatively few 
find it. He asserts that the purpose of his presence 
has to do with this process, — that men might have 
life, life more abounding and persistent than they 
now possess. 

It is a threadbare dictum of the great Synthetic 
Philosopher that life is conditioned upon adaptation 
to environment. Eternal life is conditioned upon 
the discovery of the environing God. This is the 
open secret of Jesus. The individual is mortal; but 
he may reach to immortality for himself, and pre- 
sumably for his offspring, if he follow the law for 
that case made and provided. This process he calls 
the Way of Life. To exhibit the ti-uth of all this 
would be to quote substantially the larger part of 
the New Testament. It all revolves about the new 
life of the individual man. It widens out into the 



THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 67 

thought of a society composed of such twice-born 
souls. It contemplates the action and interaction be- 
tween such a society and the natural world. It 
anticipates the ultimate dominion of such a type of 
man. It is the Novum Organon for the Human Race. 
All his sayings, arguments, metaphors, parables, 
aphorisms, are dominated by this controlling princi- 
ple. His imagery is drawn almost exclusively from 
the processes and phenomena of life. " God so loved 
the world that whosoever believeth on him should not 
perish but have aeonian life ". " That which is bom 
of the flesh is flesh, but that which is bom of the 
spirit is spirit ". " Except a man be born again 
he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven ". " He that 
hearkeneth unto me and hath confidence in him that 
sent me hath aeonian life in himself, and moves not 
to destruction, but hath passed from death into 
living ". 

The world w^as never so ready to comprehend Christ 
as it is to-day. One might say reverently that Jesus 
was the first Evolutionist. The question before us 
is not a " theological " one at all. It is the matter 
of the origin and phenomena of the highest life 
extant. It diff'ers from the naturalist's ordinary 
problem in that the study of this form leads the 
student toward the future and not back toward the 
past. It is the stage of evolutionary progress at 
which the highest extant being now is. From the 
primordial slime life is built upward, each form being 
the scaff^olding to support a farther advance, until 



68 CHRISTIANITY 

is reached the final product which we call Man. Evo- 
lution at every stage requires fit material upon which 
to work. Jesus finds the material for the New Man 
in the nature of the one which now is. His estimate 
of the quality of human nature is shown by the use 
to which he puts it. He conceives of it, not as 
" fallen ", but as undeveloped. He called himself the 
Son of Man because he wished no mistake to be made 
in the matter. If his Way should prove successful 
for himself and reach its goal, it would be made 
plain that the path would be open to any man who 
would follow him. Later on we will have to face 
the question as to how the individual being of this 
new Order is produced. But before doing so we must 
look farther at the personality whom St. Paul calls 
" the Second Man, the Lord from Heaven ". 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 



Conjecture of the worker by the work; 

Is there strength there? Enough; Intelligence? 

Ample; but goodness in a like degree? 

Not to the human eye in the present state^ 
An isoscele deficient in the base. 
What lacks then of perfection fit for God 
But just the instance which this tale supplies 
Of love without a limit? So is strength^ 
So is intelligence; let love be so. 
Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 
Then is the tale true, and God shows complete. 

Beyond the tale I reach into the dark. 
Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands ". 
Browning, " The Ring and the Book ", 



IV 

THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 

There is something strangely repellent in the con- 
ventional formularies which express the Christian 
doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. The so-called 
Athanasian Creed may well be taken for an example. 
It is true that it has never been officially accepted by 
the Church, but it may be said that it is the habit of 
orthodoxy to esteem it the most complete statement 
of the doctrine extant. If the Christian multitude 
balk at it it is on account of the hardness of their 
hearts. 

" For the right faith is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son 

of God, is God and man; 
God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before all worlds; 

and Man, of the substance of his Mother, born in the world; 
Perfect God, and perfect Man; of a reasonable soul and 

human flesh subsisting; equal to his Father as touching his 

Godhead; 
And inferior to his Father as touching his Manhood. 
"Who, although he be God and Man, yet he is not two but 
. one Christ; 
One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by 

taking the Manhood into God; 
One altogether; not by confusion of substance; but by unity 

of person; 
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man; so God and 

Man is one Christ," &c., &c. 

71 



72 CHRISTIANITY 

The secret of this repulsion is not hard to discover. 
It is not because the propositions are not true. They 
may be true enough, if they have any meaning. But 
lying behind them one feels a temper from which he 
will turn away if he can. If he has just been reading 
the Gospels, and comes from under their gracious 
spell to confront this simulacrum, he feels as one 
would to find himself unexpectedly in a room where 
a company of surgeons were dissecting the body of 
his brother. It deals with a dead Christ. The spirit 
which finds satisfaction in such work is akin to that 
which would " peep and botanize upon a mother's 
grave ". It is as though the lover should make an 
inventory of his mistress' charms, as though one in- 
scribed a Bertillon description for an epitaph on 
a brother's grave. It offends by its sheer cold-blood- 
edness. Nor is that all. One's intelligence shares 
in the offence to his reverence. For the terms of the 
formulary are really not presentable to the under- 
standing. The mind which attempts to grasp them 
is eluded and irritated. One moment it sees and the 
next moment it does not see. Opposed and incom- 
patible concepts are presented alternately and sim- 
ultaneously, until thought, beaten back and forth like 
a shuttlecock, drops exhausted. The soul is offered 
an analysis when it wants a S3^nthesis, a metaphysical 
formula when it wants a living Person. The Christo- 
logical literature of the Church is of vast extent, and 
ranges from the most exalted speculation to the veri- 
est trifling. But one rises from its study with a sense 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 7S 

of depression. He has been seeking the living among 
the dead; he is not there. 

The purpose of this writing is something altogether 
different. I would, if possible, take the reasonable 
man by the hand, and lead him into the Presence. 
If he find there mystery, and reality passing under- 
standing, it is only needful for him to recognize in 
it the same kind of mystery which he must always 
confront when he explores the arcana of Nature, or 
strives to know God. Men have no quarrel with 
mystery as such. The naturalist and the psycholo- 
gist, as well as the man of affairs and the woman 
who loves, have learned long ago that every advancing 
step of knowledge or experience brings them into 
the presence of ever-widening mystery. But what 
they demand is to know that the mysterious things 
are real things, and not figments. 

We have seen that one moiety of Jesus' work was 
to exhibit the capacity of the nature of man. To 
this end he was born, passed through the whole orbit 
of movement of a man, from the womb, through 
growth, through temptation, through death, through 
hell, into the new humanity. The other half of his 
task was to exhibit God. But according to him, the 
two processes coalesced and became one. Whoever 
sees man in his completeness finds in him something 
divine; whoever sees God finds in him something hu- 
mane. This rapprochement of God and man is the 
note of Christianity. Unless w^e assume that human 
nature and divine nature possess a quality in com- 



74 CHRISTIANITY 

mon, it is useless to enter the field of religion at all. 
For only beings of the same kind can hold intercourse. 
A man can have no commerce with a stone; a fish 
cannot speak with a bird; only a god can hold con- 
verse with God. The Gospels assume this with a 
strange simplicity. The genealogy in Luke places 
Adam in the direct line of descent between God and 
Jesus ; " Jesus, which was the son of . . . David, 
which was the son of . . . Abraham, which was 
the son of . . . Noah, which was the son of . . . 
Adam, which was the son of God ". The stirps is the 
same throughout. 

Christ regards men, not as manikins created by 
divine fiat, but as the fruit of God's loins. The Fa- 
ther's love for them is inescapable by himself. Kis 
own contentment and completeness are bound up with 
them. There is current a strange reluctance to think 
or speak of God as enduring pain. He is thought 
to be fitly conceived only as serene, impassable, un- 
perturbed in his self-centred felicity. But the God 
of Jesus is one who has borne the cross in his heart 
since before the world was. Pain is the eternal con- 
comitant of loving. Whosoever loves places himself 
within the power of the object of his love. His 
happiness is no longer in his own keeping. If the 
loved one suffer, he suffers ; if the love be unrequited 
it becomes his torment. Its purest possible form 
is that of a parent for a child. The higher the nature 
of the parent, the more inextinguishable the love. 
If the parent be absolutely good, as God, the love 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 75 

will be deathless. No waywardness of the child, no 
deformity, no folly, no crime can beat it off. The 
suggestion that the Parent would slay the child in 
order to regain his own peace or to safeguard his 
own justice, is one so wildly irrational that one can 
only stand amazed when he confronts it in theological 
guise. Suppose the All-Father, by one sentence of 
doom, to condemn and execute all his rebellious chil- 
dren, what then? Has God no memory.? Is the 
blessed power to forget one of his attributes.'^ And 
is love not made of the same stuff in all spheres of 
being.'' The eternal Father may not execute his 
children, nor can he un-get them. There remains 
therefore only to win their affection and bring them 
home. But love has no power to compel. It can 
only open its arms, entreat, solicit, and wait. 

Jesus defines himself as at once the Son of Man 
and the Son of God. That is, the Ideal Man recog- 
nizes both his parents, He opens his arms to both. 
How did he conceive himself to be related to his 
Father .f' In the first place, he boldly claimed the 
family likeness. " He that seeth me seeth him that 
sent me ". " He that seeth me seeth the Father ". 
He claimed to have a direct and immediate commis- 
sion to do certain things. " I know him, for I am 
from him, and he hath sent me ; the Father hath not 
left me alone; for I do always the things which 
please him. I came forth from the Father, and am 
come into the world ; again I leave the world and go 
to the Father ". Many a man has been " conscious 



76 CHRISTIANITY 

of a mission " in the world, but no enthusiast uses 
language like this. It is but the simple truth that his 
speech does not give in any way the impression of 
an enthusiast. There is a certain serene sanity about 
him which is not easy to define, but which is irre- 
sistible. 

Now, if it be true that he held a special commis- 
sion from God to do a specific thing, when did he 
receive it, and where, and how? He himself does not 
say. He contents himself with asserting the fact. 
He says that he " came down from heaven " ; that he 
is " doing the work which liis Father gave him to 
finish " ; that he " seeks not his own will, but the will 
of him that sent him ". He claims to have a dele- 
gated power on earth to forgive sins. Once in a 
cryptic utterance he seems to assert for himself a 
pre-existence, " before Abraham was I am ". This 
is as far as we can go, depending upon his authentic 
statements concerning himself. He believed himself 
to have a peculiar commission from God ; he knew 
his Father's will beyond the possibility of mistake ; he 
came out from the Father; he expected to return to 
the Father; and he acted as no mere man has either 
the power or the right to act. 

We may acknowledge that this seems a meagre 
way for a divine personality to show himself withal. 
" If thou be the Christ, why not tell us plainly " ? It 
would seem to have been so easy for him to exhibit 
himself in some less questionable shape. But this 
objection cannot stand against a very little sober 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 77 

reflection. Why does not God always show himself? 
Why does he leave men to grope, and hesitate, and 
speculate, lost in the mazes of the universe? The 
answer is plain. Revelation is but the obverse of 
discovery. No truth is ever revealed to an intelli- 
gence except as it is discovered. The function of any 
reality is only to be; it is the task of intelligence to 
see it. In the nature of things God, at any time or 
place, can only be found of them that seek. 

"Oh! where is the sea," the fishes cried, 
As they swam' the crystal clearness through; 

"We've heard of old of the ocean's tide, 
And we long to look on the waters blue. 
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea; 

who can tell us if such there be?" 

The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings; 
And this was its song; " I see the light; 

1 look on a world of beautiful things. 

But flying and singing everywhere, ■ 

In vain have I searched to find the air ". ^ 

The task of the disciples was to see divinity, being 
in its presence. Did they see? And what did they 
see? The most exalted term used by any of them 
during Jesus' lifetime was, " Thou art the Christ, the 
Son of the living God ". This definition, if it be a 
definition, he expressly approved. Now, what did 
they mean by it? I do not ask what the words con- 
note when we use them, but what did Peter at 
Caeserea mean by them? The reply is. He did not 



78 CHRISTIANITY 

know clearly what he meant. It is the language of 
emotion, reverence, adoration. In that mood the 
mind does not attempt to define. The term used 
served well enough to express a feeling. And after 
all, the fact that Christ was able to arouse that 
feeling is a better proof of his divine quaHty than 
it would be to extract from his followers the most 
scientific definition. 

The terms used, " Christ ", and " the Son of God ", 
were common in Jewish speech. But they were not 
used with any scientific precision. They were simply 
titles for an exalted personage. In a way, " Mes- 
siah " was to Jews very much the same thing that 
" Christ " is to the unthinking multitude among 
Christians, a high and divine personage, somewhere 
between God and man. 

At that stage the Christian conception of Jesus 
stood for thirty years after his disappearance. His 
first ambassadors had no defined Christology. They 
were immediately concerned with liis resurrection and 
its practical consequences. As to the Person who had 
risen, they presented him under a variety of terms, 
with the idea that he was a divinely exalted person, 
but they did not identify him with God. Six weeks 
after the resurrection, Peter, as the delegate of the 
apostolic band, for the first time preached Christ to 
the crowd. He introduces him as " a man approved 
of God unto you by mighty works and wonders which 
God did by him " ; as " the Holy One " ; as " the 
Messiah ". A little later, in his next address, he calls 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 79 

him " the Righteous One " ; the " Prince of Life " ; 
the " Servant Jesus whom God anointed " ; a 
" Prince and Saviour ". Stephen used words of hke 
import. Paul in his speech at Athens, spoke only of 
" Jesus and the Resurrection ". It is noteworthy 
also that in the same address, when he was arguing 
with the Greeks about the real God as contrasted 
with their idols, he makes no mention of Christ at 
all. At this point they stood for many years. The 
fact was, they felt no need for any more precise defini- 
tion of the Christ. Pie possessed their worship wholly, 
and they were under a driving enthusiasm. More- 
over, Christianity was at the first deemed both by 
its friends and enemies to be a movement within 
Judaism. The Christians were still Jews, and they 
had no thought of becoming anything else. Their 
aim was " to redeem Israel ". They did not realize 
at all that Christ's relations were with the universal 
world. For the purpose in hand, the terms in which 
they presented him were quite sufficient. 

But when Christianity was driven to see that Juda- 
ism was too narrow for it, and was led to confront 
the pagan world, the necessity for some more coherent 
and portable conception of Christ became evident. 
So long as they preached the " Messiah " to Jews 
they did not need to define the term ; but when they 
undertook to preach Christ to pagans, the first ques- 
tion which they must hear and answer was, " What 
is this Christ ".? At this point we meet St. Paul. We 
may say that we owe to him the Christ of Christen- 



80 CHRISTIANITY 

dom. His first step was to disentangle Christ from 
the Jewish Messiah. That conception, as we have 
seen, was both too narrow and too incoherent to fit 
it. He makes little of the actual life of Jesus, in 
fact seldom refers to it at all. Indeed it may well 
be doubted whether he was familiar with anything 
more than its chief incidents. Of all writers who 
have influenced the world's thought and life, Paul is 
perhaps the most difficult to construe. He mingles 
dialectics, poetry, exhortation, and rhapsody, as only 
untrained genius could do. He nowhere sets out in 
formal propositions his conception of Christ. But 
it is not difficult to gather from his undisputed Epis- 
tles his main idea. He refers not at all to the teach- 
ings or acts of Jesus. The only saying of his which 
he quotes at all is one which is not recorded in any 
of the Gospels. He concerns himself exclusively with 
the resurrection, and with the death, which he re- 
gards as practically a part of the same event. The 
Christ of Paul is a being of a quite different kind 
from the Jesus of the Gospels. It is a transcendent 
being whose orbit only intersects that of the historic 
personage at the point of his death. He depicts 
Christ as " the image and likeness of God " ; as one 
in whom is reflected " the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God " ; the " Man from Heaven " ; the 
" Life-giving Spirit " ; the " one without sin " ; the 
" One sent from God " ; but he always stops short of 
identifying him with God himself. Indeed in one 
crucial passage he shows that he conceives him to be 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 81 

still, in the scale of being, separate from and sub- 
ordinate to God : — " I would have you to know that 
as the head of the woman is the man; the head of 
every man is Christ ; and the head of Christ is God ". 
In substance, he took the Hebrew-Christian " Mes- 
siah ", broke it up, set free the Christ which they 
had concluded in it, and set him in the place of su- 
preme honor, over all things in the universe, but 
beneath God. 

Thus far we have taken account only of those 
religious ideas and things which had place within 
the narrow circle of Judaism. But that complex 
thing which we call Christianity has drawn and woven 
into its fabric material from very many and very 
different sources. " The world ", says Dill, " was 
in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly 
in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from 
whatever quarter it might come ". From the Stoics 
had already spread the brotherhood and equality of 
men, an active pity for the miserable and succor for 
the helpless, the notion of moral equality of the 
sexes, and a gentler consideration for the slave. 
From the religions of Egypt and the East had come 
the idea of sacramental grace, and crude adumbra- 
tions of immortality. The cults of Mithra, Isis, and 
the Great Mother had made familiar the ideas of 
baptismal regeneration, the blood bath for the mys- 
tical washing away of sins, the mystic meal of bread 
and consecrated wine, the recovery of the Great 
Mother from the dead at the time of the spring 



82 CHRISTIANITY 

equinox, and the great Festival of the sacred year 
on the 25th of December. Pagan theology had al- 
ready elaborated a celestial hierarchy, in which the 
Deity, while in essence remote and inaccessible, was 
linked to humanity by a graduated scale of inferior 
spiritual beings, the equivalent of angels, archangels, 
thrones, dominions, and powers. Philo and the 
Alexandrians had developed the Platonic idea of the 
" Logos ", — the Word. All these forms of thought, 
empty of any real spiritual contents, lay ready at 
hand for the new Religion, empty bottles to be filled 
with the new wine. 

The author of the Fourth Gospel, whoever he was, 
and whenever he wrote, took the incomplete Christol- 
ogy of Paul, together with the highest there was in 
paganism, and carried them both up boldly above 
Judaism and heathen Philosophy, into cosmology. 
The writer had before him the facts of the Gospels, 
and the interpretation of Paul. He takes the facts 
and lifts them into the category of the divine. At 
the very beginning of his Gospel he applies a new 
term to Christ, the term wliich the world's highest 
thought had prepared for this use. " In the begin- 
ning was the ' Word ', and the Word was with God, 
and the Word was God ". The term Logos, which 
in the New Testament is rendered " Word ", is one 
which cannot be expressed in English except by a 
difficult and clumsy circumlocution. It is enough 
to say that the purpose of the writer was, by means 
of it, to identify Christ with the essence of God. 



THE PRIMITIVE CHRIST 83 

The later conception of two or more persons in the 
Godhead, and the essential relations of these per- 
sons to one another, does not seem to have been in 
his mind. He saw in the very nature of God a 
" Father " and a " Son ". He saw the Son going out 
into the universe upon an errand of God, and there 
are intimations that he saw a third spiritual person- 
ality concerned in the transaction, but beyond this he 
does not go. For any farther development of the 
Doctrine of Christ we must go to the Church and 
not to the New Testament.^ And now, what is the 
substance of it all? What but this? — In the career 
of Jesus is exhibited in actual experience both the 
ideal life and possibility of man ; and also all of God 
which is expressible in terms of humanity. The mo- 
tive compelling the amazing phenomenon is that God 
is Love; that he has begotten cliildren; that the 
children, being but children, are wandering with aim- 
less feet and perishing; that the Son, first-born 
among many brethren, comes with his Father's bene- 
diction to lead them home ; that his way leads through 
pain and death ; that in the radiance of his risen life 
some of the children at least — the Magdalen first of 
all — recognize him and cry, Rabboni, which is to say. 
Master ! 

The two foci of the whole orbit of Christianity 
are these, — Did the man Jesus pass through death, 

^ It seems proper, for certain reasons, to say that I stop 
in the argument before reaching the Doctrine of the " Trinity." 
I have stopped where the Catholic Creeds stop. 



1 
84 CHRISTIANITY i 

and still remain alive? and, What reason is there 
to believe that other men will, or can, do the 
same? Is the matter of personal immortality in j 

any way connected with Jesus who is called the j 

Christ? ' 



BODY AND SOUL 



" It may be that these things are all vain ; and that 
our own spiral of light^ no less than that of the bees, 
has been kindled for no other purpose save that of 
amusing the darkness. But also it is possible that some 
stupendous incident may surge from another worlds 
from new phenomena_, and either inform this effort with 
definite meaning, or definitely destroy it. Still our 
wisest plan will be to remain faithful to the destiny 
imposed on us, which is to subdue, and to some extent 
raise within and around us the obscure forces of 
life " — Maeterlinck. 



V 

BODY AND SOUL 

Since men have known anything they have known 
that there is some connection between the soul and 
the body. The first savage who was knocked sense- 
less by the blow of another savage's club must have 
learned by that rude experiment that a broken head 
interrupted or confused his thought. One of the 
most amazing things, however, in the history of the 
race is the way in which the significance of this gen- 
eral fact failed to be recognized. There was here 
one of those vicious circles within which human 
thought remained confined for ages. It was assumed 
that mind and body were two separate and inde- 
pendent things, living together, but each with a life 
of its own. The falsity of this could not be seen 
until the true relation between them should be dis- 
covered ; and the true relation could not be seen until 
the false assumption was abandoned. So the matter 
remained until our own time. The soul was believed 
to inhabit the body as a tenant dwells in a house 
upon an uncertain lease. That the two should inter- 
act upon each other was no more thought than that 
a house could affect the character of a tenant. The 
sum of knowledge was that when the house fell into 

87 



88 CHRISTIANITY 

decay or was broken up by catastrophe, the tenant 
moved away. Aberrations or confusions of the mind 
were accounted for by the operations of other spirits. 
Possession, obsession, demoniacal influences, ac- 
counted for insanity, and free and independent exist- 
ence of the mind accounted for sanity. It is hardly 
more than a century since the nexus of mind and 
body began to be studied. When Hartley announced 
his theory that mental action was dependent upon 
definite functions of the brain he met with almost 
universal incredulity. When Cabanis, half a century 
later, delivered his brutal dictum that " the brain 
secretes thought as the liver secretes bile ", he 
shocked society, not because he said a thing grossly, 
but because he said it at all. Now it has become 
part of everyday knowledge that mind and body are 
so essentially interrelated that the diverse faculties 
of the mind are bound up with certain specific por- 
tions of the brain and nervous system. Whatever 
may be said of the overfanciful refinement of the 
anatomist in trying to locate too minutely the nervous 
areas which are concerned with definite psychic ac- 
tivities, the general fact is accepted. We do not 
now send our insane to be exorcised. We do not hold 
a sick man morally responsible for his mental or 
moral vagaries. The whole world allows that physical 
lesion produces a state of mind. But the implications 
of this admission are incalculable. Dr. Keene re- 
ports this case to me. A lad of fifteen is brought to 
him suffering from epilepsy. He is a partial im- 



BODY AND SOUL 89 

becile, slavering, violent, obscene, untruthful, thiev- 
ish, a foul travesty of humanitj^ — a youthful 
Caliban. Certain symptoms point to a pressure upon 
a certain spot of his brain. An unnoticed and for- 
gotten scar confirms the diagnosis. The skull is 
trephined, the pressure removed, and the epilepsy is 
cured. But that is the least of it. His obscenity, 
deceit, and dishonesty are cured also. Not seven 
devils have been cast out of his soul, but a little point 
of bone has been lifted out of his brain. The result 
is the same. But the barest recognition of this fact 
renders necessary a new definition of the soul. The 
" soul " has seemingly been convicted of false pre- 
tences. Instead of being an independent entity, living 
in the body and dominating it, it appears to be but 
a convenient word to designate the complex sum total 
of the highest output of the organized body. As 
Haeckel puts it^ " all the phenomena of the psychic 
life are without exception bound up with certain ma- 
terial changes in the living substance of the body. We 
do not attribute any peculiar ' essence ' to its soul. 
We consider the psyche to be merely a collective idea 
of all the psychic functions of protoplasm ". 

This is the last word of science upon the soul. Nor 
can we dismiss it or disregard it as only the ipse dixit 
of an extreme scientific dogmatist. No doubt Pro- 
fessor Haeckel can be fairly so called. But then all 
biologists, chemists, physicians agree with him up to 
this point. Whatever we may find the soul to be 
over and above, this fact we must reckon with, that it 



90 CHRISTIANITY 

is as dependent upon matter for its being as matter 
is dependent upon it for its organization. And this 
interdependence of mind and matter exists through 
every step in the range of living things. In the 
lowest forms of living creatures the whole proto- 
plasmic cellular mass is all body and all mind. With- 
out organs or differentiated faculties, any portion 
of it responds to any stimulus which may touch it. 
In the next higher stage the mind begins to be local- 
ized. Rudimentary sense organs begin to appear, 
little protoplasmic filaments and pigment spots be- 
come the forerunners of organs of perception. In 
another stage the nervous system becomes sufficiently 
organized to show phenomena which cannot be dis- 
tinguished from intelligence. Finally the highest of 
all psychic action shows itself by converging all 
sensation upon a certain specific spot of the nervous 
substance of the brain, and being reflected back in 
self-consciousness. There is no break or gap or 
interruption in the long series of evolution. From 
the beginning to the end physical progress and psy- 
chical progress are bound up together. They do not 
seem to move always in parallel lines or with an 
equal pace, but to be interrelated parts of one living, 
creeping, climbing life. Mind, or at least something 
so much like mind that their phenomena cannot be 
distinguished, seems to belong to organized matter 
down to its very lowest form. Indeed the highest 
intellectual faculties seem to be but aggregations and 
correlations of innumerable primary sensations, and 



BODY AND SOUL 91 

to be dependent upon the action of remote centres, 
so that " memory " and " volition " may fairly be 
said to be functions of each and every microscopic 
body-cell. The ancient chasm between animal and 
vegetable life has been long filled up. The micro- 
scope furnished the tool. Now it has been estab- 
lished that the animal and the vegetable are but 
bifurcated branches of a tree whose stem and roots 
are in common. Nor does inexorable science stop 
there. The genealogy of the protoplasmic cell itself 
has been traced. Every multicellular organism be- 
gins its life as a stem-cell, an impregnated ovum. 
Even at the beginning the cell has a psychic life of 
its own. And underneath this lies a region wherein 
the chemical processes of the not living and the psy- 
chic action of the living meet and mingle. 

It seems probable that that mysterious and in- 
scrutable thing which we call " life " is being always 
secreted, as it were, from inorganic matter, in the 
secret places of the earth and sea. It looks as though 
the old dictum, " ex oviimi ovo ", would have to be 
qualified at least. Spontaneous Generation may be 
a fact after all. The chemist and the biologist have 
done many marvellous things. If they have not been 
able to transform any atom of dead matter into 
living. Dr. Loeb and others have done something so 
much like it that it is best not to deny the possibility 
longer. Moreover, it is hasty to conclude that be- 
cause men have never done it, it is never being done. 
It is hard to believe that the sum total of life has 



92 ' CHRISTIANITY 

remained a constant quantity since the creation of 
the world. God's laboratory of nature is constructed 
upon an enormously complex scale. Because the 
chemist with his vials and retorts cannot produce life 
from lifeless matter establishes no presumption that 
it is not being done continually in ocean's depth or 
in that boundless region of the infinitely little beyond 
the ken of the microscope. Above all it is perilous 
to build a philosophy or a religious faith upon a 
foundation which would be destroyed if the generatio 
equivoca should turn out to be a fact. Through the 
efforts of chemist and biologists, the gap between the 
inorganic and the organic worlds which once seemed 
to be infinite, has been constantly narrowed. No 
student of the physical sciences would be surprised 
to learn any day that the bridge which spans it had 
been discovered. 

Now the whole line of thought briefly sketched 
above is absolutely new. Not only were St. Paul and 
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas utterly unaware of 
the facts, but so were Calvin and Jonathan Edwards 
and Bishop Butler. No doctrine of the resurrection 
of the dead, or of the life to come, formulated even 
fifty years ago, can be satisfactory to the man of 
to-day. The actual amount of knowledge accumu- 
lated during these years concerning the nature and 
laws of life and death, of generation and decay, of 
force and energy, and their transfoiTnations, is 
greater by an immeasurable increment than the sum 
of all that preceded. To refuse to take account of it 



BODY AND SOUL 95 

would not only be futile, but would write us down 
as less intelligent than the Fathers, who availed them- 
selves of all the science they possessed to elucidate 
and fortify their beliefs. 

But we cannot deny or evade the fact that the new 
biology and physics have overclouded the common 
hope of life in the world to come. The simple dual- 
ism upon which that hope has heretofore been based 
is no longer believable. The phenomenon of a hu- 
man personality can no longer be accounted for by 
the assumption of a temporary union of an immortal 
soul and a perishable body. The nexus has been 
seen to be, not arbitrary and artificial, but organic. 
This conviction, which cannot be resisted, has over- 
weighted and sunk in many their belief in the life 
everlasting. To many this has been a burden more 
heavy than would be a judge's doom to death. They 
see that what they call the body and what they call 
the soul are so identified in their w^hole career, from 
the germ cell to the grave, that they cannot any 
longer think of the psychic personality surviving the 
break-up of the physical organism. When they at- 
tempt to do so, they find the same intellectual help- 
lessness they would if bidden to think of shadow with- 
out substance or extension without form. For them 
not only has the hope of immortality faded, but the 
very existence of such a present fact as soul has 
become difficult to believe. So correlated are psychic 
and physical energy that the soul of man threatens 
to disappear as an objective reality. 



94 CHRISTIANITY 

At this point the attempt has often been made to 
find rehef by drawing a line through psychic phe- 
nomena, and labelling those nearest to the physical 
basis " Instinct ", and those higher up " Reason ". 
This latter, it is contended, together with the Con- 
science or ethical faculty, constitute the soul proper 
and are peculiar to man. Grant, it is said, all that 
biology claims concerning the mental life of animals, 
still man is marked off by the possession of psychic 
qualities so different in kind from those of the lower 
creatures that he still stands unique in the possession 
of a soul. This has proven, however, to be but a 
frail dike set against the incoming of the tide. So 
long as psychologists confined their researches to 
the human mind, this position remained tenable. As 
early as 1760 Remeirus called in question the validity 
of the distinction between Instinct and Reason. The 
time, however, was not ripe, and his discoveries at- 
tracted little notice. But during the last half-cen- 
tury Darwin and Romanes, Sir John Lubbock, Wundt 
and Buchner, Ladd, Moulton and James, and their 
co-laborers have conducted experiments so many and 
so careful that the former classification of psychic 
action into Reason and Instinct has been definitely 
abandoned. Perhaps it would be more accurate to 
say that psychic actions may be thus distinguished, 
but that reason is not confined to man nor instinct 
to beasts. For example, among Indians and other 
savages the sense of direction is, so far as one sees, 
just as much an instinct as it is in the homing pigeon. 



BODY AND SOUL 95 

The faculty, moreover, seems to be the same in kind, 
and not differing greatly in degree. Nor is this the 
only " instinct " of man. The newborn babe knows 
how to suck. The young mother knows how to hold 
the babe to the breast. Sex desires know the way to 
their gratification, and the like. 

But the important fact for our purpose is that 
those higher faculties, such as reason, choice, number, 
shame, and duty show themselves in creatures far 
below man in the graduated scale of being. We need 
not stop to notice the strange wisdom of the ant and 
the bee, whose lilliputian commonwealths might in 
many ways be models for human cities. The " rea- 
son ", however, which they display shows such strik- 
ing limitations and peculiarities that it may be set 
aside, if we choose, as automatic or purely reflex. A 
characteristic of Reason is to discern an object de- 
sired, and to use rational and suitable means to attain 
it. A very few instances, chosen at random from 
the mass of experiment and observation recorded, will 
suffice. I begin with an experiment made by myself. 
During a hunting trip I was in camp with a friend 
in the wilderness of the far Northwest. A mile above 
the camp was a beavers' dam. We visited or passed 
it almost every day, and every day saw the marks 
of the beavers' nocturnal handiwork. One day, to 
see what the inhabitants of the aquatic village would 
do, we broke a chasm two feet wide in their dam. 
Next day the gap was mended. In the night the ani- 
mals had gone ashore, cut down a tree eight inches 



96 CHRISTIANITY 

in diameter which stood more than a hundred feet 
from the stream. The trunk of the tree was of no 
use for their purposes. They felled it to procure the 
small limbs which grew twenty feet from the ground. 
The chips showed that they had cut the limbs where 
they lay into pieces of the proper length to mend 
the hole in their dam thirty yards distant. Each 
stick was just long enough to reach across the break 
and allow enough to lap over and hold at either end. 
These they had conveyed to the place, inserted, inter- 
laced with small twigs, and tamped with earth and 
leaves so that the dam was good as new. Now, note 
what they had done. First they had surveyed the 
breach, and seen how, and how alone, it could be 
mended. Then they sought the suitable material for 
the repairs. For this they felled a tree to secure 
the limbs which were in sight, but not within the 
reach of animals who could not climb. Then they 
ascertained the length required for the pieces to be 
used. Then they cut them off in situ and carried 
them to where they were needed. The ultimate pur- 
pose of it all was to save the doors of their houses 
from being exposed by the threatened lowering of 
the water. In what way, then, does this action differ 
in kind from the reason of a man who builds a 
house ? 

Take another instance quoted by Romanes from 
Thompson. In his camp in the jungle he had a 
monkey tied to a long upright bamboo pole by a 
chain running on a ring, which allowed the monkey to 



BODY AND SOUL 97 

climb to the top, where was a seat upon which he 
passed most of his time. While he sat there, the 
thievish crows which swai*med about stole the food 
which was placed every morning at the foot of his 
pole. To this he vainly expressed his objection by 
chattering and slipping down in vain effort to catch 
them. " One morning, however, he appeared to be 
seriously ill; he closed his eyes, dropped his head, 
and exhibited other evidence of severe suffering. No 
sooner were his ordinary rations placed at the foot of 
his pole than the crows, watching their opportunity, 
descended in numbers, and as usual began to demol- 
ish his provisions. The monkey now began to de- 
scend the pole by slow degrees as though the effort 
overpowered him, and as if so overcome by illness 
that his remaining strength was hardly equal to the 
exertion. When he reached the ground he rolled 
about for some time, seeming in great agony, until he 
found himself close to the vessel where the crows had 
by this time wellnigh devoured his food. Then he 
lay apparently in a state of complete insensibility. 
After a little a crow plucked up courage to approach 
and stretch his neck toward the food. As quick as 
thought the monkey seized it and secured it from 
doing farther mischief. He now began to chatter 
and grin with every expression of gratified triumph, 
while the crows flew about cawing, as if deprecating 
the chastisement about to be inflicted upon their 
brother. The monkey continued for a while to chat- 
ter and grin in triumph ; he then deliberately placed 



98 CHRISTIANITY 

the crow between his knees, and began to pluck it 
with the most humorous gravity. When he had com- 
pletely stripped it, except of the larger feathers in 
the wings and tail, he flung it in the air, from where 
it fell to the ground with a stunning shock. He then 
ascended his pole, and the next time his food was 
brought, not a single crow approached it." Now, 
in what essential quality was the mental action of 
this monkey different from that of a farmer, with 
a sense of humor, who sets a trap for the crows de- 
vouring his corn.P 

Once again, selecting from that treasure house of 
facts gathered by Darwin. " A troop of baboons 
were observed crossing a valley in Abyssinia. Some 
had already ascended the opposite mountain, and 
some were still in the valley, when the latter were 
attacked by dogs, but the old males immediately hur- 
ried down from the rocks, with mouths open, roaring 
so fearfully that the dogs quickly drew back. They 
were again encouraged to the attack, but by this 
time all the baboons had reascended the heights ex- 
cepting a young child of about six months, who, 
loudly calling for aid, climbed upon a block of rock, 
and was surrounded. Thereupon, one of the largest 
males came down again from the mountain, slowly 
went to the young one, coaxed him down and carried 
him away, the dogs being too much astonished to 
make an attack ". What does this action of the 
baboon show different from that supreme moral sense 



BODY AND SOUL 99 

which moves its possessor to imperil his Hfe for his 
brother? 

Such facts as the above might be quoted to fill vol- 
umes from the mass of literature upon the subject 
accumulated within a generation. One of them, how- 
ever, is as good as a thousand. The effect of them 
all has been to establish the truth of the generalization 
made by Darwin fifty years ago. " The difference 
in mind between man and the higher animals, great 
as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. 
The senses and instincts, the various emotions and 
faculties, of which man boasts, may be found in an 
incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed, con- 
dition in the lower animals ". And Darwin lies, with- 
out protest, in Westminster Abbey ! 

We have reached the point where the old phrases, 
" the immortality of the soul ", and " the resurrec- 
tion of the body " must take on new meanings if 
they are to be comprehended, and must deal with 
new difficulties if they are to be retained. If the truth 
which these phrases have heretofore expressed suf- 
ficiently well is to be kept alive among men, its roots 
must be traced to a reason immeasurably deeper down 
in the nature of things thjtn is generally realized. If 
it be the fact, as it appears to be, that belief in a 
future life is being given up by intelligent men, we 
may be assured that it is not because the " instinct 
of living " is any less strong in them than in their 
forefathers. It is not that they desire life less, or 
because they are more willing to be resolved into 



100 CHRISTIANITY 

nothingness. It is because their hope has met defeat 
at the hands of other truth which has slowly shown 
itself. There are multitudes for whom neither the 
old phrases nor the old arguments will any longer 
suffice. To clear these away is an ungracious and 
distasteful task. They are so intertwined with re- 
ligious sentiment and human affection that to disturb 
them seems to some little short of a wanton outrage. 
They are formulated in creeds, enshrined in poetry, 
hymns, liturgies. They are ingrained in the very 
fibre of religious faith and are powerful sanctions for 
conduct. Why disturb them? The only answer is, it 
is always best in the long run to know the truth. It 
is better that the simple Christian within the Church 
should have his beliefs disturbed than that his brother 
should be kept out of the Kingdom by these beliefs. 
It is not only better intrinsically, but it is also the 
way of Christ. The little ones whom he warned 
against offending were those who were kept out of the 
Kingdom by the inconsiderate action of those within. 
We need have no fear that belief in " the resurrec- 
tion of the dead and the life of the world to come " 
will be abandoned, provided only it be conceived of 
in such a way as will allow it to be correlated with 
all else which we know to be true. 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 



" In progress toward the goal, nature will have to 
be consulted continuously. Already, in the case of the 
ephemerids, nature has produced a complete cycle of 
normal life ending in natural death. In the problem 
of his own fate, man must not be content with the 
gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own effort. 
Just as he has been able to modify the nature of 
animals and plants, he must attempt to modify his 
own constitution so as to readjust its disharmonies ". 

Metchnikoff. 



VI 

THE BASIS OF IMIMORTALITY 

Two things are usually taken for granted in all 
discussions concerning future life. One is the essen- 
tial immortality of the soul; the other is that the 
same kind and quality of soul is common to all men. 
Are these assumptions warranted? To merely raise 
the question will seem preposterous to some. Never- 
theless the question must be asked. For the present 
I postpone any attempt to define shai^ly the term 
soul, and use it in its popular sense, which is for 
this stage of the argument sufficiently definite. 

It is commonly assumed that each individual soul 
had a beginning, but is so constituted and com- 
pounded of such stuff that it is intrinsically imper- 
ishable. This belief lies at the bottom of the current 
conceptions of Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. To 
many it will be a surprise to be assured that this is 
not a Christian belief at all, but a pagan one. 
Neither is it now, nor has it ever been, the general 
belief even in paganism. The great mass of savage 
and semi-civihzed men have never had any clear 
opinion upon the matter either way. Indeed, they 
do not think of " the soul " at all in the way we do. 
They often have a sort of vague notion of a shadowy 

103 



104 CHRISTIANITY 

double of the individual, which may for a time flit 
about his tomb or roam in happy hunting grounds; 
but they do not possess any such abstract concep- 
tions as " eternal ", " immortal ", or " self-existent ". 
When they advance farther in the path of thought 
they either think of the personality maintaining a 
kind of family, corporate perpetuity, as throughout 
Eastern Asia generally; or else they think of the 
individual as seeking to lose his identity, and finally 
losing it in Nirvana, which, for the individual con- 
sciousness at any rate, is the end of being. The 
general thought of intelligent paganism can hardly 
be better stated or by a more competent witness 
than Wu Ting Fang, sometime Chinese Ambassador 
to the United States : — 

" What I understand by religion is a system of doctrine 
and worship. As such it recognizes the existence of a divine 
supreme being and of spirits having control of human des- 
tinies, who vi^ant to bring men back from the error of their 
ways by holding up the fear of everlasting punishment and 
offering everlasting happiness for goodness. One of its car- 
dinal doctrines is that there is such a thing as life after 
death. I must confess that the thought of the immortality 
of the soul is pleasant. I wish it were true; but all the 
reasoning of Plato cannot make it anything more than a strong 
probability. I am not aware that in the advance of modern 
science we have advanced one step more from uncertainty than 
did Plato. It must not be said that Confucius denies the 
existence of these things, but regards all speculation upon 
them as useless and impracticable. He would be called an 
agnostic in these days. * What is death ' ? asked a disciple 
of him, and he replied, 'You don't know life yet; how can 
you know about death'? Such are the guarded words of 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 105 

Confucius on this subject. Life itself is full of mysteries too 
deep for human thought to fathom. There is no use in trying 
to tear apart the veil of death to take a peep at the place 
beyond. No one has ever been able to add one tittle of evi- 
dence concerning the future of man after death, and of the 
world of spirits ". 

\ 

The fact is that only within Christendom and Islam 
is the immortality of the individual soul assumed. 
To the contention that belief in future life has been 
held always and everywhere and by all men, the only 
reply is, the facts are not so. It is as far as possible 
from being true to-day. The overwhelming maj ority 
of men are now, as always, at too low a stage of 
intellectual development to comprehend the thought. 
The most that can be said is that among most people 
is a rather vague and incoherent notion that the 
individual will retain a kind of tenuous existence for 
a longer or shorter time after death. But it is, at 
its clearest, only a phantom-like being, and they do 
not conceive it as eternal, nor does the term eternal 
convey any meaning to them. Moreover, the testi- 
mony of the most trustworthy observer is that from 
among many peoples this whole set of ideas is 
entirely absent. The Bushmen of South Africa, the 
Veddahs of Ceylon, the Blacks of Australia, the 
Diggers of Utah, and such like do not seem to have 
any more idea of a post-obituary existence than do 
the beasts of the field. Indeed, the history of thought 
witnesses, as clearly as it can witness to anything, 
that it is not until a really high state of intellectual 



106 CHRISTIANITY 

development is reached that any idea of future life 
emerges, and that belief in the soul as a self-existent 
entity is not reached until intellection has well-nigh 
reached its summit. Not until Democritus and 
Empedocles and Plato and Socrates, and Epicurus 
and Seneca become possible does the idea of immor- 
tality appear. At a date much earlier the Egyptians 
had wrought out scientifically their scheme of the 
future life; but they by no means predicated it of 
all men, but only of the " good " and of these only 
after they had been rendered immortal by union 
with Osisiris. Among the early Hebrews the idea 
was scarcely present at all. Says the Grand Rabbi 
Stein : " What causes most surprise in reading the 
Pentateuch is the silence it seems to keep respecting 
the most fundamental and consoling truths. The 
doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the 
resurrection of the body are able powerfully to for- 
tify man against passion and vice, and to strengthen 
his steps in the rugged paths of virtue. But one 
searches in vain for these truths which he desires 
so ardently. He does not find either them or the 
resurrection of the dead ". 

Among the later Jews, the contemporaries of 
Jesus, the notions concerning the soul and its destiny 
were so incoherent and contradictory that it appears 
hopeless to attempt their reconstruction. Speaking 
broadly, they did not conceive of the soul as an 
entity separate and independent of the body. The 
dream of a corporate or tribal immortality which 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 107 

tliey had held before their eyes for ages had 
for the most part rendered them careless of the des- 
tiny of the individual. If " Israel " were to abide 
to the ages of ages, it mattered little what became 
of his children one by one. The most intelligent 
and influential section, the Sadducees, were frank 
materialists. They believed " neither in angels nor 
demons nor in the resurrection of the dead ". The 
Pharisees were divided into paltry schools, and were 
busy debating such trivial puzzles as whether or not 
one should rise with his clothes or naked, whether 
he would burrow like a mole underneath the earth 
so as to rise in the sacred soil of Judea, or rise in 
pagan soil and be instantly rapt through the air 
to the holy land. But none of them believed in or 
expected resurrection or immortality for any but 
members of the chosen race. An immortality be- 
longing to man as such, and based upon the essential 
deathlessness of the soul, was utterly foreign to their 
thought. Dr. Piepenbring states their belief 
thus : — 



"Along with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead 
which arose and was developed among the Palestinian Jews, 
we see the doctrine of the immortality of the soul take shape 
among the Jews of Alexandria. It appears for the first time 
in the apochryphal book of Wisdom. According to this book 
souls pre-exist, and are confined to the body as in a prison. 
The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God; after 
they have passed through the crucible of trial they shine, they 
judge the nations, they govern peoples; thus the righteous live 
forever. The wicked seem to be fated to annihilation. These 



J08 CHRISTIANITY 

ideas are still farther developed by Philo, by whom it clearly 
appears they were borrowed from Plato ". 

I pass over for the present the teaching of Jesus 
and the New Testament. That must form the basis 
of the truth we seek later on, and must be examined 
more at leisure. Awaiting that I ask, — ^What did 
the people of the early Christian Church, say during 
the first four centuries, believe generally concerning 
the soul and its possible destiny? We need not be 
surprised to find that their beliefs were confused 
and contradictory. No matter what the teaching 
of Jesus in the premises may or may not have been, 
the early Christians came to it with presuppositions 
and habits of thought already formed. As has been 
already pointed out, it is never possible for a man 
to disentangle himself at once from his old beliefs 
in taking in new truth. Both Greek and Roman 
preconceptions were present, as well as Hebrew ones. 
Indeed they were far more potent; for even in the 
first century the Church had moved completely away 
from its Hebrew entourage, and was thereafter re- 
cruited from heathens. A careful study of the ante- 
Nicene " Fathers " can but convince one that in 
and among them a number of ethnic notions were 
striving to express, each in its own terms, the truth 
which Christ had left among them. The early Chris- 
tians had all been reared in the religions either of 
Judea or Greece or Rome. Those among them who 
had been reared Jews unconsciously transferred their 
idea of a corporate or tribal immortality from their 



THE BASIS OF BIMORTALITY 109 

old faith to the new, and their imaginations were 
filled with the vision of a " Second Coming " and a 
" New " Jerusalem. Those who were Greeks brought 
to the new religion the Platonic idea that the in- 
dividual soul is imperishable, being in fact an articu- 
late portion of the substance of the mind of God. 
Those of Roman antecedents, having no inherited 
belief in a future life of any kind, were better pre- 
pared to understand the truth of Christ. The inter- 
action of all these fragments of previous philosophy 
produced a confusion and uncertainty of mind which 
was not clarified for five centuries. Then the mas- 
terful Augustine, the man who fixed the lines in which 
the thought of the civilized world ran from the sixth 
century to the nineteenth, took Plato's doctrine of 
the immortality of the soul, disengaged it from 
metempsychosis and transmigration, and gained for 
that general acceptance which it has held to this day. 
Clement (/. Epis., xxvi) teaches the resurrection 
of the good, and proves it by an appeal to the well- 
known phenomenon of the phoenix rising from his 
ashes, but has no expectation of future life for the 
wicked. Justin Martyr in one place (/. ApoL, xvii) 
expects the resurrection both of the just and the 
unjust, and proves it by appealing to the recognized 
fact that departed human souls are even now in a 
state of sensation, as is shown by their being invoked 
by magi and dream-senders, as well as at the oracles 
of Dodona and Pytho. In another place, however 
{Dialog. Tryph., v.), he expressly denounces and 



110 CHRISTIANITY 

dismisses the Platonic doctrine that the soul is im- 
mortal. Athenagoras (De Resurec.) takes for 
granted unqualifiedly the native immortality of the 
soul, and makes a striking argument for the resur- 
rection of the body. Tertullian in his treatises On 
the Soul and On the Resurrection of the Flesh gives 
by far the fullest presentation of what was com- 
monly believed in his circles, but it is quite impossible 
to make him consistent with himself or with other 
Christian writers of the same period. Upon the 
whole, however, he leaves the impression, afterward 
confirmed and fixed by Augustine, that he believes 
the soul to have an independent existence of its own, 
and to be by its own nature indestructible. The 
truth seems to be that just as the Greek influence 
gained domination in the early Church the Platonic 
doctrine of a natural immortality which it brought 
with it came to be accepted. The notion was with- 
stood from the first as being subversive of the very 
essence of Christianity. Theophilus, Irenseus, Cle- 
ment of Alexandria, Arnobius, and, most weighty 
of all, Athanasius in his treatise on the Incarnation 
of the Word of God, all strenuousl}^ fought against 
it as a pagan error which brought to naught the 
work of Christ. They were defeated, however, and 
the conception prevailed which is vulgarly common 
to-day, of an immortal soul and a mortal body, tem- 
porarily joined, then sundered, then reunited in 
an imperishable personality. Its currency has prob- 
ably confused and obstructed the work of Christ 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 111 

among men more than all other obstacles combined. 
A pagan speculation has masqueraded so long as 
an elemental Christian truth that now, when the 
intelligent world is well disposed to receive and com- 
prehend Jesus' revelation of the life to come, Plato 
stands across the path and is commonly mistaken 
for Christ. 

Thus it has been taken for granted during many 
centuries that " Man " occupies a unique and sol- 
itary place at the head of the ranks of living things, 
with an impassable chasm between him and them, 
and this in virtue of his possession of psychic quali- 
ties which they lack. For the purpose of the natu- 
ralist this classification is satisfactory. But for 
the psychologist it is quite misleading. It rests upon 
physical data only. There are races of existing 
" men " whose powers of language, for example, seem 
still in the transition stage between articulate and 
inarticulate speech. The vocal utterances of the 
Bushmen of Africa consisted largely of a series of 
peculiar clicks that were certainly not articulate 
speech, though on the road to it. The Pygmies of 
Central Africa seem similarly to occupy an inter- 
mediate position in the development of language. 
Those who have endeavored to talk with them speak 
of their utterance as being inarticulate sound. In 
short, the great abyss which was of old thought to 
lie between the language of man and that of the 
lower animals, has largely vanished, and through the 



112 CHRISTIANITY 

labors of philologists we can trace the stepping stones 
over every portion of the wide gap. 

The same thing is true concerning reason, memory, 
sympathy, and love. The simple fact is that in the 
attempt to trace the origin, development, and destiny 
of the soul, the naturalist's classification of " man " 
and " animal" must be disregarded. In advance 
one cannot say where the line between mortal and 
immortal creatures will be found. It may conceiv- 
ably coincide* with the one which marks off Genus 
Homo, Class Mammalia, Order Primates; or it may 
be found to run below that so as to include some 
of man's humble kinsmen ; or it may be found neces- 
sary to settle upon a line running irregularly 
through and amidst the ranks of men. The soul has 
its own laws and announces its own requirements. 
It may turn out that all whom we call men are not 
Man. For natural science it is true that " God hath 
made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell 
upon the earth ". They breed together, and that 
settles the question of physical relationship. But 
there are psychic relationships between man and 
animal quite as intimate and as real as the physical 
relationship between man and man. Measured by 
psychic standards, the interval between the lowest 
man and the highest is a hundredfold greater than 
that between the lowest man and the highest brute. 
It ma}^ be humiliating, but it is true, nevertheless, 
that we are far more closely related to the animals 
on the spiritual than we are on the bodily side. A 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 113 

comparative anatomist would distinguish at sight 
between the fossil bone of a man and of an ape. 
But let a certain action involving mind be described 
to him, and he may be quite unable to say whether 
the actors are men or beasts. For example, here 
is one related by James Forbes in his " Oriental 
Memoirs " : — 

"One of the females had been killed and her body carried 
to our tent. Forty or fifty of the tribe soon gathered around 
the tent, chattering furiously and threatening an attack, from 
which they were diverted only by the display of the guns, 
whose effects they perfectly understood. But while the others 
retreated the leader stood his ground, continuing his threaten- 
ing. Finding this of no avail, he came to the door of the tent 
alone, moaning sadly, and by his gestures seemed to beg for 
the dead body. When it was given him he took it up in his 
arms and carried it away to his companions." 

What we are seeking is a spiritual organism 
sufficiently developed to cohere through the shock 
of physical dissolution. If we must predicate immor- 
tality of every sentient being which possesses reason, 
affection, and ethical faculty, then we must enlarge 
the borders of Hades to receive innumerable animals. 
If we demand a higher psychic basis to make con- 
tinued existence possible, then we may well be forced 
to deny it to multitudes of beings which we call men. 
There has seemed to be no deliverance from this 
dilemma, because we have assumed that the natural- 
ist's classification of man and animal, which is real 
in the physical, is also valid in the psychic realm. 



114 CHRISTIANITY 

While it was believed that all mankind were the 
children of a single pair, specially created, only a 
few thousand years ago, the difficulty was insuper- 
able. But now we know better. Geology has un- 
folded the rocky leaves of earth's history and found 
man's mark inscribed aeons ago. His descent from 
pre-human and semi-human ancestry is as well es- 
tablished as any human belief can ever be. To say 
that " Evolution is not proven " is simply trifling 
with truth. Nothing is ever proven or can be in 
the sense that objection demands. But it is so well 
established that the world of thought and knowledge 
has ceased to defend it. To determine in the case 
of any individual being whether or not it has attained 
to the possession of a soul capable of continuance 
is difficult indeed. But it is no more and no less 
difficult than to decide at what point of its em- 
bryonic growth it becomes human. The ovum of a 
man and of a dog are absolutely indistinguishable. 
The human embryo runs through and recapitulates 
in a marvellous way the line of ascent from the 
low order of life, through which the race has climbed. 
It has been generally taken for granted that it 
becomes possessed of a " soul " at some point be- 
tween the fertilization of the ovum and the issue 
from the womb. But for this there is not the slight- 
est evidence. It has been seen that the very germs 
themselves have an antecedent history as strange 
and complex as that of the embryo. They also 
move, choose, select, repel, show preferences, in a 



THE BASIS OF IMMORTALITY 115 

word they appear to have personalities of their own 
as really as does the new-born babe. The biogenesis 
of the soul cannot any longer be concluded between 
conception and birth. It is already clear that the 
psychic life which we call mind in man, instinct in 
the beast, and affinity in the germ cell is the same 
thing; that it develops according to laws of its 
own; that it is from first to last correlated with 
an organized material structure ; that at certain 
stages in its upward movement it takes on new and 
strange forms which could not at all be predicated 
from any study of it at a previous stage. But the 
thing of supreme importance for our purpose is 
that the upward steps or stages of physical evolu- 
tion do not at all coincide with the steps or stages 
of psychic evolution. Reason, of a high order, for 
example, is found among the coelentera, seems to lie 
dormant through the reptile stage, and shows itself 
at unexpected and incalculable places among the 
mamalia. Does reason in man take on any new 
quality, in virtue of which every individual becomes 
immortal? The secret which we long to discover 
is this : — Does the psychic life of an individual at 
any stage of evolution attain to such a high, stable, 
and independent existence of its own that it will be 
able to subsist in spite of the disintegration of the 
physical organism with which it is correlated? What 
are the conditions upon which a survival must de- 
pend? Are these conditions satisfied in the psychic 
life to be found in the lower animals? Are the 



116 CHRISTIANITY 

conditions present in the case of every indi\'idual 
of the race which we call Man? Or is the possibility 
of individual immortality only reached at a point 
more or less defined in the progress of man him- 
self? In fine, is man immortal, or is he only im- 
mortahle? 



IMMORTABILITY 



" For man is, according to nature, mortal, as a being 
who has been made out of things which are perishable. 
But on account of his likeness to God he can by piety 
ward off and escape from his natural mortality and 
remain indestructible if he retain the knowledge of God, 
or can lose his incorruptibility if he lose his life in God ". 
— Athanasius. 



VII 

IMMORTABILITY 

The problem of immortability, that is, of poten- 
tial immortality, has been hopelessly confused by 
the traditional assumption that all those living 
creatures who are classed as Man on physical 
grounds are also Man on psychical grounds. This 
being assumed, the question of a future life has 
been one concerning a race rather than concerning 
individuals. This explains why all arguments for 
immortality have been so unconvincing. They have 
tried to prove too much. The considerations which 
would establish immortality for all men, in virtue 
of the qualities which they possess as men, are 
equally valid for many of the lower animals. The 
point at which we will probably have to look for 
immortability is not at that which separates man 
from the brute, but at that which separates between 
one kind of man and all the rest. The story is told 
of a distinguished Frenchman, who, to the long argu- 
ment of a friend against the possibility of a future 
life, replied, "You say you are not immortal? 
Very probably you are not ; but I am ". This is 
much more than a smart repartee. It is the solution 
of a problem otherwise insoluble. Whatever may 

119 



120 CHRISTIANITY 

be the difficulty in drawing such a line among men 
does not concern us at this point in the argument. 
It is enough for the present to point out that it 
is far less difficult to draw the line this way than 
any other way. We but faintly realize how low 
in the scale of being the lowest man is, or how high 
the highest is. Beings are living upon the earth 
to-day at every conceivable stage between that of 
the semi-human Akka, who has no religion, no super- 
stitions, no developed moral sense, and the enlight- 
ened American or European Christian whose sense 
of moral personality is far stronger than is his 
sense of physical being. It appears to be most 
reasonable that at some point, yet to be defined, 
but between these extremes, the " power of an endless 
life " is reached. 

We have now reached the point where the crucial 
question must be faced. If we are driven to believe 
that immortality may be predicated of some mem- 
bers of the race, or of one kind of man, then we 
must ask. Where is the line to be drawn? At what 
point in the upward movement does the individual 
personality take on those qualities which may enable 
it to survive the death of the body? Upon what 
does immortality depend? What are its conditions? 
How can those conditions be fulfilled? Are they 
at all under the control of the individual will? Or 
is the individual on entering into the eternal life 
as passive and helpless as he is in being ushered into 
this world from the womb? 



IMMORTABILITY 121 

Before attempting any reply to these questions 
it will be well to stop long enough to make one or 
two needful distinctions. In the first place, there 
have been not a few, both in ancient and modern 
times, who have maintained the truth of a " Con- 
ditional Immortality ". But they have in every case 
assumed that all human beings are by nature pos- 
sessed of the same endowments. If some become im- 
mortal and others do not, it is only because immor- 
tality is, as it were, impressed upon some from the 
outside. It is a gift arbitrarily bestowed. It is 
because one has been born of the Holy Spirit in 
Baptism, and another has not; or because one has 
partaken of the imperishable body and blood of 
Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and another has not; 
or it is because one has by a deliberate act of will 
" accepted Christ ", and on the instant been " born 
again " or such like. The " condition " which the 
advocates of conditional immortality have always 
propounded have been extraneous, arbitrary, arti- 
ficial. What we maintain is something radically 
different. No doubt the conditions named above may 
be found to be concerned, but the distinction itself 
is far deeper, more natural and reasonable, even 
though it be far more difficult to state. It is a 
biological process we are seeking to trace, and a 
biological classification we attempt to discover. It 
may be that the biological classification we are in 
search of may turn out to be also a religious one. 
We believe it will. But it will be religious because 



122 CHRISTIANITY 

it corresponds to an actual reality already existent, 
and not because of an arbitrary divine arrangement. 
What we maintain is that if any human life becomes 
capable of passing on into another with personality 
intact, it will be because such a life has already 
reached to a stage of spiritual fixedness and stability 
which will make survival " natural " to it, and de- 
struction " unnatural ", and that such an achieve- 
ment, if it be reached at all, must be along the ex- 
tension of the same path by which the soul has 
climbed up from the primordial slime. 

Again, it is of the first importance that we should 
realize the limitations of the problem before us. I 
have throughout used the term immortality as equiv- 
alent to survival after death. It is necessary, how- 
ever, from this point on, either to avoid the word 
altogether or to reach an understanding as to the 
sense in which it is used. Speaking accurately, im- 
mortality is a quality which can never be predicated 
of any soul, either here or hereafter. " God alone 
hath immortality " is not only a scriptural, but a 
scientific datum. Eternity is a category of the un- 
conditioned. But the soul is an organism; and the 
condition of every organism continuing in being is 
that it shall be able to function, and that it shall 
correspond with its environment. In this sense we 
do not look for immortality. Our quest is an humbler 
yet sufficiently momentous one. We simply try to 
ascertain from the data available whether we can 
find a means of transit for any human personality 



IMMORTABILITY 123 

from this life to the next one. Whether, if that 
prove possible, its life there shall be brief or long is 
a question not now before us. 

The world teems with life. The sea swarms with 
fishes, the land is carpeted with plants. Li^dng 
things populate the surface, creep and burrow be- 
neath the soil. Life is everywhere, in every drop 
of water, in every grain of dust, filling the still 
summer air with its multitudinous drone, roaring in 
the streets of men's great cities, crowding and chok- 
ing in the forests of the tropics. Try as we may, 
we cannot adequately realize its abundance, its mul- 
titude, its myriad forms and ways. It emerges silent 
and unseen from inorganic matter, and crowds every 
step of the long, strange, tortuous path upward to 
its supreme manifestation in human self-conscious- 
ness. 

When we look at it steadily we are arrested by 
the significant fact that the ultimate goal of each 
individual is to pass on to another the life which 
it possesses. If it can only reproduce, it is ready 
to die. Its organs of reproduction are the ones to 
which all others are ministrant. Its provisions for 
locomotion and digestion are but means to this end. 
Countless millions only exist long enough to copulate, 
and give up their lives in the act. In the vegetable 
world this is the universal rule. To the same end 
the instincts and appetites are subsidized. The 
" imperious instinct of propagation " dominates all 
desires, is stronger than pain or even the fear of 



1S4 CHRISTIANITY 

death. In all except the highest forms it is not 
even left to choice. Reproduce they must, even if 
it cost life. In the whole organic world every other 
consideration is subordinated to the single purpose 
of keeping the stream of hfe flowing. This deter- 
mination is so inexorable that, lest it may be defeated, 
a thousand individuals are brought into life only 
to perish, in order to make sure that from among 
them all one may reproduce. Even in man the pro- 
vision for reproduction determines the whole plan 
of his being. His term of life is adjusted to the 
length of time required to reach puberty. When his 
power to reproduce declines, he begins to die. His 
intellectual habits are correlated to this function. 
His social habits are ultimately fixed with reference 
to this need. " Be fruitful and multiply " is the 
primordial command stamped upon the very con- 
stitution of animate nature. 

But once this truth has been realized, it leads us 
to confront the supreme difficulty. Life seems to 
be everything, and the individual nothing. If only 
the species can win its way forward and upward, 
the unit appears to be of no value. We appear to 
be caught in the current of a mighty moving stream 
of life which will assimilate our juices and sink us 
in the slime or fling us dead upon the shore, without 
ruth, even as without anger. The life is everything; 
the organism in which the life is for the moment 
conserved seems to be nothing. Now, if an indi- 
vidual immortality is to become possible, nothing less 



IMMORTABILITY 125 

is necessary than a reversal of tliis elemental law. 
It is clear that that can only be achieved if an 
individual be found who is stronger than his species. 
Up to this point life sweeps round everlastingly in 
a closed circle, from seed through plant or animal 
to seed again, and so about continually. If escape 
from it be ever possible it must be at a tangent and 
by some kind of individual whose life orbit sweeps 
far enough away from its material centre to be 
caught in some mighty attraction from beyond. And, 
to continue the figure, the difference between the 
individual who passes on and the one who remains 
enchained within the circle of nature need be only 
infinitesimal, provided it occur at the right point. 
An illustration which may serve to make the matter 
plainer may be drawn from mathematical physics. 
Take the case of two bodies moving through space. 
One of them has for its path the extremest conic 
section, a curve with the greatest possible eccen- 
tricity. The path of the other is a parabola. The 
difference between the two curves is literally infin- 
itesimal; yet moving in the one the body must 
ultimately return to the point from which it started, 
while the other will move out into infinite space. 
May we not similarly expect that a difference cor- 
respondingly slight in the ps3xhic movement of an 
organism may produce a result equally important? 

In the lowest order of life there are really no 
individuals at all. It is simply a speck of pro- 
toplasmic jelly, uniform and slightly sensitive. It 



126 CHRISTIANITY 

has no limbs, organs, or members. To multiply it 
merely breaks in two. Each part is as much or 
as little offspring as it is parent or self. Each 
half, in turn, divides again, and so the propagation 
goes on. It cannot be said that individuality belongs 
to any of its units, for each unit is divisible, and 
it is the essence of personality to be indivisible. 
In a higher stage of being a sort of compound or 
communistic individuality begins to show. Not until 
a comparatively high stage of evolution does the 
real individual appear " whose life is in itself ". 
Then he appears, only to live his little life, beget 
a child if he can, and perish. The multitude of 
living forms merge as it were into a mighty river 
flowing through the asons and dropping over the 
precipice to death, more numerous than all the 
drops at Niagara. Nor does the spectacle cause 
moral distress or revolt until the individual atoms 
come to be of such consequence that we rebel at 
the aimlessness of it all. No beast has been de- 
frauded of any due because it has to die. Mere ex- 
istence and sensation have been for it a boon, whether 
its life be short or long. This is also true of the 
brute-like man, and, what is of more consequence, 
it is his own judgment in the case. He clings to 
life for its own sake, and the lower in the scale he 
is the less tenacious he is. Even Laertes can face 
the end with a light heart because he has had his 
life. Not till a Hamlet arrives does he begin to 
question whether it is better to be or not to be. 



IMMORTABILITY 127 

Considering the whole human race, from its primeval 
brutishness until now, it is probable that the over- 
whelming majority have no unliquidated claim upon 
existence. They have had the gift of living, have 
made of it all that could be made, and there is nothing 
more due them. But there are many, surely, of 
which more can be said. Their psychical life is 
stronger than their physical; their affections are 
stronger than their appetites; their spirits have es- 
tablished so many relations with other personalities, 
with nature as a whole, with ideals which are more 
real to their apprehension than is matter itself, with 
the Infinite Person whom they feel enfolding them- 
selves and nature in his arms, that to think of them- 
selves coming to naught because the foundation of 
a material body is cut from under them by death, 
brings to our feeling a sense of distress and un- 
reasonableness which is intolerable. Such an one 
has already learned the secret of going beyond 
himself by his sympathies. He is an individual, as 
the inorganic crystal is, as the germ cell is, as 
the brute is, as the animal man is, — ^but he is some- 
thing more. In common with all these he is under 
the law which subordinates the individual to the 
species, and disregards it when it has once served 
its use of reproduction. But he has, to some de- 
gree at least, and in some portion of his being, 
escaped from this law by having come into the 
possession of certain qualities which cannot be prop- 
agated by reproduction. He did not reach these 



128 CHRISTIANITY 

qualities at the point where he became man by bodily 
structure, or by the possession of mind, but at an 
uncertain point high above that of primitive man. 
But wherever and whenever this new faculty is 
reached, we may fairly expect that it will be pre- 
served in being. This conviction does not come 
alone, or in the first place, from religious faith, 
but from watching nature's ways. One thing science 
knows quite well; that is, that nature does not hesi- 
tate a moment to change or to reverse methods 
which she has used through long stretches of time 
whenever she has something to gain by such reversal. 
If it shall appear at any stage in the upward move- 
ment that more is gained by keeping an individual 
in a continued life than by breaking him up for 
sake of the species, we may expect that nature will 
find some way to do so. The inexorable forces of 
gravitation and chemical affinity had their own way 
in the universe for an eternity, until they were 
arrested and turned about in the interest of life. 
Overproduction, and the survival of the fittest held 
their ruthless sway until they were reversed in the 
interest of affection. The supremacy of the race 
at the expense of the individual we may expect to 
continue just until something in the individual comes 
to be of more importance than that law, and no 
longer. 



JESUS' TEACHING 



" The most common of those feelings which present 
obstacles to the pursuit of truth are aversion to doubt; 
desire of a safe medium; the love of system; the dread 
of the character of inconstancy; the dread of innova- 
tion; undue deference to human authority; the fear of 
criticism ; regard to seeming consistency ". — Whately^ 
" On Bacon's Essays ". 



VIII 
JESUS' TEACHING 

The idea of " eternal life " has always been asso- 
ciated with that of moral goodness. Evil and death 
are cause and effect. Righteousness and long life; 
sin and degradation ; this is what men have always 
believed to be in some way a fundamental truth. 
But it is greatly to be doubted whether they have 
realized how true it is. 

In a very real sense a race or a people or a nation 
is an individual, with a personality of its own. The 
long history of the past is strewn with the dust of 
dead peoples. In a few instances their rise, climax, 
decline, and decay lie within the historic period. 
No doubt these arose from among the ruins of 
innumerable earlier peoples. Why have some sur- 
vived while others perished? Why do one or two 
peoples, or families of peoples to-day feel and show 
the sense of secure being, while others are slowly 
decaying under our eyes? The reason is, a people's 
length of healthy life depends upon its goodness; 
not, finally upon its physical vigor, or its mental 
advance, but its moral worth. Mr. Gladstone main- 
tained that the physical and intellectual equipment 
of the average Greek of the time of Pericles, was 

131 



13^ CHRISTIANITY 

considerably higher than that of the average Eng- 
lishman or American of to-daj. It is very possible 
that the Babylonians and Egyptians more than 
equalled us in these regards. The phallic symbols 
strewing the ruins by the Euphrates, and the abom- 
inations sketched upon the walls of Pompeii give the 
clue to their decay. What prevented the American 
Indian, in possession since the dawn of time of the 
most abundant region of the earth, with his great 
physical development and mental force, from de- 
veloping a civilization which would have been abid- 
ing? What explains the ruin of Rome and Con- 
stantinople, and the states of Asia Minor and North 
Africa? The answer is in every case the same; they 
perished from lack of goodness. No other quality 
could procure for them continuance in existence. 
The Teutons have endured, and promise to endure, 
in virtue of certain racial moral qualities which they 
developed ages ago, and which have saved them from 
being brutalized by their own strength, or from 
sinking in their stupidity. Goodness can thus arrest 
and turn back for nations the primal law of growth, 
vigor, and decline. Is it too much to believe that 
it may do the same for the individual? 

But if anything like this be true, it is clear that 
the chance of future life turns upon a question of 
present fact. Does one, or does he not, in any 
instance, possess a moral energy sufficiently strong 
and coherent to dominate his life? The mere pos- 
session of a potential faculty for goodness, or the 



JESUS' TEACHING 133 

actual manifestation of a rudimentary ethical sense 
will not suffice. Brutes have that much. The races 
which perished had the same. Only a moral nature 
developed far enough to take command over the 
turbulent appetites and errant mind will serve the 
end. Now, it is clear that some possess this quality, 
and some do not. It is a quality correlated in some 
degree, though not very closely, with intellectual 
forwardness. A simple hind may be very good, and 
an undevout astronomer may be morally an imbecile. 
We have seen above that there are now living 
whole tribes of undeveloped savages, who have no 
more moral energy than the brute, — for it must be 
remembered that the brutes have some. To raise 
the question of immortality concerning them would 
be irrelevant or premature. They have not yet en- 
tered really into the human life which now is, to 
say nothing of that which is to come. At every 
other plane of biologic advance, an individual here 
and there, no doubt, rises far above either his 
fathers or his children, and wins for himself the 
power of infinite progression. But the place of 
escape from the closed ring of what we call nature 
is not at the body or the mind, but the conscience. 
If that gate be not found, or if it be too narrow 
for egress, there cannot, in the nature of the case, 
be any thoroughfare. Nor is it easy to expect 
immortality for multitudes far closer to us than the 
Pygmies or the Bushmen. As one wanders observ- 
antly and thoughtfully amongst the crowds which 



134 CHRISTIANITY 

teem in the purlieus of a great Christian city, as he 
watches their faces, listens to their meagre speech, 
penetrates to the interior of their shallow lives, 
realizes their brutishness and mischievousness, be- 
comes familiar with their desires and ideals of life, 
above all, as he sees their look of blank insensibility 
to any moral appeal, he is hard put to it not to 
ask himself, — are these really men? I confess 
frankly that when I have tried to speak to certain 
kinds of men of " righteousness, temperance, and 
judgment to come ", I have felt that the effort was 
little less vain than would have been the same ex- 
hortation to my good dog. One can, it is true, make 
his appeal to the fear of death, and can thus evoke 
a response in the form of terror. But one can do 
the same by pointing his gun at a predatory crow. 
The fear of death and the belief in a future life 
are two entirely different things, and have no neces- 
sary relation to each other. So far as one can see, 
the fear of death, as an emotion, does not differ 
either in degree or kind between the natural man 
and the natural beast. The natural man's life may 
be Edenic or it may be barren and squalid, but he 
does not come in sight of the tree of life until he 
leaves it. Myriads still dwell in it, being yet as 
" Adam " was. While at that stage the questions 
which concern them are those which are asked by 
zoology, comparative anatomy, and psychology. Re- 
ligion simply cannot speak to them at all until they 
become as gods, knowing good and evil. When that 



JESUS' TEACHING 135 

stage is reached, and not till then, does eternal life 
come within the possibilities. " Tliis is eternal life, 
to know God " ; and God is apprehended only through 
the moral sense. 

We may admit without hesitation, that it is not 
possible to define the point at which the capacity 
of eternal life is reached in the development of the 
individual. This does not touch the central truth. 
No physicist can draw a line and say, here inorganic 
matter becomes organic ; no botanist can say, here 
vegetable life becomes animal ; no naturalist can say, 
here the invertebrate ends and the vertebrate begins ; 
no psychologist can say, here instinct ceases and 
reason begins. No anthropologist can draw a line 
below man, or through men, or in the life of the 
individual man, and say, here, now, is conscience. 
But facts do not cease to be facts because their 
classification is impossible. We may rest this phase 
of the argument at this point, having in its defence 
all the broad analogies of nature and the history of 
peoples. It ought not to be a surprise, and it ought 
to be a relief, if we find it to be also the teaching 
of the Scriptures. 

For many it would be of inestimable value to have 
some definite deliverance of Jesus Christ upon the 
question before us. Are all men immortal, or are 
only some? Is a universal resurrection a thing 
which he takes for granted, or is it not? An ex- 
plicit dictum of his upon the subject would be to 
many of us an end of controversy. But it comes 



136 CHRISTIANITY 

as a sort of shock to be reminded, not only that 
he does not say, but that he avows, at the time when 
he spoke upon the general subject, that liis informa- 
tion was limited. " Of that day and hour no man 
knoweth, not even the Son ". It is not impossible, 
however, to ascertain at least in general, what his 
belief was. In the first place we have a sufficiently 
full report in the Gospels of what he actually said. 
It is true that the report is incomplete and fragmen- 
tary, but it is coherent. Then we have in the other 
portions of the New Testament the interpretation 
and expansion of his teaching by very intelligent and 
sympathetic contemporaries. Finally", and chiefl}^, 
we have his own extraordinary career. This last will 
constitute a portion by itself; for the present we 
ask the limited question, — ^What did Jesus, during 
the period before his " resurrection ", believe and 
teach touching the future life? 

The fact that his language was intelligible to those 
who heard him is proof that his general presump- 
tions were the same as theirs. But it is the simple 
fact that they were not believers in " the immortality 
of the soul ". If a previous belief in inherent im- 
mortality had been needful to enable them to under- 
stand his farther teaching in the premises, then he 
would have been obliged to say so. The point is 
that he took for his premises the beliefs which his 
hearers actually entertained. It is at once most 
necessary and most difficult to bring ourselves to 
realize that his hearers did not have at all the be- 



JESUS' TEACHING 137 

liefs which are taken for granted now. Some of them 
did not believe in any future life at all. Some of 
them believed in corporate immortality for the people 
Israel, with which individual continuance had nothing 
to do. Some of them believed in the resurrection 
of those of the race of Abraham alone. Some looked 
for the immortality of only the righteous of that 
race. But nobody believed in the immortality of 
every human being as such. It is clear, therefore, 
that when he faces a company of this sort, if what 
he was about to teach was dependent for its validity, 
upon that belief which is now common, the presump- 
tion of universal future life, he must have said so. 
But he did not say so. Moreover, the assumptions 
now current would not have availed him at all. One 
of the most difficult things is to read the true mean- 
ing into a word or phrase to which one has long been 
in the habit of attaching a mistaken or secondary 
meaning. When we find Jesus using such antitheses 
as " life and death ", " eternal life and destruction ", 
" living and perishing ", it is at least probable that 
he used the words in their natural and obvious sense. 
But we have for so long been accustomed to think 
of eternal life as being equivalent to eternal happi- 
ness, and the converse, that it will require a strenuous 
and continued effort to see in Jesus' words what they 
meant and what alone they could have meant to those 
who heard them. Another thing to bear in mind is 
that he never deals in abstractions. He has nothing 

o 

to say about " man," but only about men. He never 



138 CHRISTIANITY 

refers to " the soul " or " the human soul ". He 
never discusses the question of immortality in the 
abstract, but only the possibilities and destinies of 
individuals. He never assumes that man is mortal, 
or immortal, he only points out to the individual 
which way life lies, and which way destruction. And 
what is possibly more important for our purpose 
than anything else, he plainly declares that many wiU 
be constitutionally incapable of understanding him 
at all. In other words, he announces that he speaks 
to those whose spiritual faculties are sufficiently de- 
veloped to respond to the stimulus of the truth. 
" He that hath ears to hear, let him hear ". 

Bearing these preliminary considerations in mind 
we may now ask, — What did he say? His teaching 
may be divided into two portions which differ greatly 
in form, if not in contents. The most prominent, 
but least clear, is that extended address in apocalyp- 
tic form, suggested by his disciples' inquiry concern- 
ing the fate of Jerusalem. The great difficulty in 
the way of determining his precise meaning here is 
the fact that the form of the address is evidently 
not his own. It is framed in that cryptic manner 
common to all the later apocalypses, and is derived 
from the earlier prophetic style.^ Dr. Gould in 
his " Theology of the New Testament " well says of 
it, " Simple as are these teachings, Jesus has been 
the subject of the most serious misunderstandings 

^Cf. Is. 13:9,10; 24:21-23; Ezek. 32:7-10; Joel 2:10; 
Dan. 7:13. 



JESUS' TEACHING 139 

from the beginning. The last things of which he 
speaks are not the end of the world, but of the age. 
Whatever was predicted here by our Lord was to 
take place within the generation succeeding his death. 
There is a consensus of scholars about this, the only 
question being whether or not he made a mistake. 
And it is strongly against the assumption that he 
did make a mistake, that he sets forth in the parables 
a statement of the slow growth of the Kingdom 
which clearly contradicts the idea of an early com- 
ing ". In any case, and whatever it may purport, 
the last apocalypse of Jesus is so dramatic in form 
and imagery that not much can be learned from it 
as to the essential nature and possibilities of the 
individual man. This must be sought from his more 
definite teaching. 

When one weaves together the words of Jesus 
as they are scattered through the Gospels, he finds 
that he has before him a biological treatise. 
He finds the conditions set forth upon which con- 
tinuance in being is possible, the perils to which 
being is exposed, the means to counteract these 
perils, and the ultimate issues of living. But he 
finds also that the theme throughout is the life itself. 
The alternatives set forth are not future pleasure 
and future pain, but living or ceasing to live. The 
Gospels are biological altogether. They speak a 
language more intelligible to-day than it ever was 
before. The imagery is drawn almost exclusively 
from the processes and phenomena of life. The 



140 CHRISTIANITY 

reason is evident; the illustrations are determined 
by the theme. The question is not of rewards and 
penalties, but of living or perishing. Whatever of 
pleasure or pain is implicated is incidental. He be- 
gins by stating the case in terms which every biolo- 
gist knows to be true of life at every stage, " Enter 
ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate and 
broad is the way which leadeth to destruction, and 
many there be which go in there ; because strait is 
the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth into 
life, and few there be that find it ". Of fifty seeds 
oft nature brings but one to bear. " He that hear- 
eth my word and believeth on him that sent me hath 
everlasting life and shall not pass on to destruc- 
tion, but hath passed out of death into life. That 
which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which 
is born of the spirit is spirit. Marvel not, there- 
fore, that I say unto you that except a man be 
born from above he cannot enter into the kingdom 
of God ". The place of any creature is determined 
by its actions, for " every plant is classified by the 
fruits it bears. Men do not gather grapes from the 
acanthus nor figs from brambles. A good plant 
cannot produce bad fruit, nor an evil plant good 
fruit. But every plant that does not bring forth 
good fruit is cut to pieces and thrown in the fire ". 
The spiritual life follows the analogy of the natural 
life both in origin and method. " For as the Father 
quickeneth the dead and maketh them living, so the 
Son quickeneth whom he will. He that hearkeneth 



JESUS' TEACHING J41 

unto my word, and hath confidence in him that sent 
me, hath seonian life and moveth not to destruction, 
but hath passed out of the dead into the living. 
I declare unto you that if a man keep my saying 
he shall never see death. Leave the dead to bury 
their dead, and follow after me ". He insists that 
this higher and more enduring life ought to be 
achieved at any cost. " For what will it profit a man 
if he gain the whole world and fall short (^ry/xtoo)) 
of his soul? Or what shall a man get in exchange 
for his soul? If thy right e3'e or thy right hand 
should be in the way, pluck it out, cut it off, for 
it is better that one of thy members should perish 
than that thy whole body should be thrown away ". 
These quotations should suffice to show his teach- 
ing. All the others are variations upon the same 
theme. He makes his appeal to the instinct of liv- 
ing. If you do thus and thus, following in my steps, 
you can secure for yourself a life so prepotent that 
w^hat you call death cannot ruin it. Blessed are the 
meek, the pure in heart, the unselfish, for the new 
kingdom belongs to them. If you devote your ener- 
gies to building up your lower life, you w^ill lose 
everything, because it comes to an end, but if you 
disregard it in the interest of my eternal gospel of 
goodness, you will find an asonian life. What is all 
this but the annunciation of the last term in the 
long series of organic evolution. And is it not 
supremely trustworthy as being the dictum of " the 
Man most man "? 



14a CHRISTIANITY 

No doubt the question will arise, If this is actu- 
ally the teaching of Jesus, how comes it that he has 
been so long and so persistently misconceived? If 
the teaching of Jesus was biological, how has it come 
to be thought of as legal? If his distinction was 
between a perishable and an abiding life under con- 
ditions now existing, why has it been construed to 
refer to the contrast between happiness and agony 
in a future life, to which all men are destined in any 
case. It may be replied that, at any rate, he was 
not misunderstood by his Apostles and earliest in- 
terpreters. 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 



Sleep'st thou indeed? or is Thy spirit fled 
At large among the dead? < 

Whether in Eden's bowers Thy welcome voice j 

Wake Abraham to rejoice, i 

Or in some drearier scene Thine eye controls | 

The thronging band of souls; j 

That, as Thy blood won earth. Thine agony ; 

Might set the shadowy realm from sorrow free ". | 

— Keble. -i 



IX 

THE FIRST TO CROSS 

The earliest writings in which the name of Jesus 
appears were written from thirty to fifty years after 
his death. None of these are reasoned and formu- 
lated statements of belief. They consist chiefly of 
certain letters which have survived from the cor- 
respondence carried on between some of his followers. 
This correspondence is often of an intimate and 
personal character, sometimes it is letters written 
by a prominent man to a club or group of Chris- 
tians, to be read by them and passed on to other 
groups. In such composition we cannot expect to 
find any very definite or precise statements of doc- 
trine. They bear much the same relation to Chris- 
tianity as do, for example, the familiar correspond- 
ence of Huxley and Gray and Darwin to the doctrine 
of Evolution. In such a case it is not so much 
what the writers say as what they take for granted 
that enables one to see their real position. With 
the exception of the Fourth Gospel and the Apoca- 
lypse it may be assumed that the whole New Testa- 
ment was written within fifty years after the death 
of Jesus. Now, the question is, do these writings 
take for granted the indestructibility of the soul, and 

145 



146 CHRISTIANITY 

the natural immortality of all men? There is no 
doubt of the answer; they do not. Moreover, such 
an assumption makes their arguments in many cases 
unintelligible, and in not a few renders them worth- 
less. 

In general, it may be said without hesitation, the 
New Testament continues the same biological theme 
around which the teaching of Jesus revolved. Their 
arguments do not start, however, as his do, from 
the facts of being, but from the fact of his resurrec- 
tion. But their assumptions are the same as his. 
The earliest of the books of the New Testament 
are two letters written by St. Paul to a little group 
of converts which he had made some years pre- 
viously at Thessalonica. At the time when he wrote 
it was generally expected by the Christians that 
Jesus' plan was to reappear while his friends still 
lived, gather them out of the world, and then make 
an end of all things, to reconstruct the earth and 
open a new regime. They believed the fact of his 
resurrection, but they had not come to see the place 
of that fact in the economy of life. This expecta- 
tion of the early end of the world colors all the 
earlier New Testament writings. It was a naive 
error which only death and the passing of the years 
could correct. They felt that they had come in- 
dividually into the possession of a life of such quality 
that it would endure, but they saw at the same time 
that they were growing old physically. It came to 
the knowledge of Paul that his Thessalonian con- 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 147 

verts, whose expectation was the same as his own, 
were disturbed and perplexed because some of their 
number who with them had been waiting for the 
Lord's coming, had fallen asleep. Had they, in 
consequence, missed the immortality which they ex- 
pected? Paul thereupon writes to reassure them. 
What he says and what he does not say are equally 
noteworthy. He has nothing to say to them about 
universal resurrection and immortality. He writes : 
" I would not have you to doubt concerning them 
that have fallen asleep, or that you should sorrow 
as do other people, who have no hope for the dead. 
For as we believe that Jesus died and rose again, 
so also we believe that God will bring back with him 
them that have fallen asleep in him. I assure you, 
in God's truth, that we who may be alive at the 
Lord's coming, will not have any advantage over 
them that have fallen asleep. For the Lord shall 
descend from heaven with the voice of the archangel 
and with the trump of God ; and first the dead" in 
Christ shall rise ; and then we that are alive, together 
with them, shall be caught up in the clouds to meet 
the Lord in the air ". He was still of the same 
opinion when he wrote the Thessalonians his second 
letter; but as the years went on, and the real sig- 
nificance of Jesus' resurrection came to be better com- 
prehended, he came to think of the new life less and 
less in connection with any great cosmic cataclysm, 
and more and more as the manifestation of a supreme 
vital force which would continue to operate accord- 



148 CHRISTIANITY 

ing to its own laws to the end of the ages. His 
matured behef is expressed in that divine classic 
which for twenty centuries has been read by Christian 
charity over the dead bodies of saints and sinners 
alike, the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the 
Corinthians. It is a marvellous construction of 
faith, science, poetry, and high aspiration. But it 
concerns itself solely with the " dead in Christ ". 
The " natural man " is left outside its conclusions 
in express terms. If any one question this, let him 
read it; but let him read it all. When he has read 
that " as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall be 
made alive ", let him read on, " but each in his own 
order, Christ the first fruits, then they that are 
Christ's ; and that is the end ". The drama is closed 
and the stage cleared before the " natural " man 
has any standing upon it. 

" That which is natural comes first, then that which is 
spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthen; the second 
man is of heaven. As is the earthen, such are they also that 
are earthen; and as is the heavenly, such are they that are 
heavenly. As we have borne the image of the earthly, we 
shall also bear the image of the heavenly. For I declare 
this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption ". 

I am well aware that all tliis may seem to some 
to be an unwarrantable attempt to read into St. 
Paul's words a meaning which they will not bear. 
I can only urge that this seems to me to be the 
obvious and natural meaning, and the only meaning 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 149 

which those to whom the letter was written could 
have found in it. And this conviction is established 
by the fact that this meaning squares with the fun- 
damental biological purpose of the Gospel of Christ. 
The quintessence of the matter is that life in its 
supreme phrase conforms to the law of life in all 
its stages. It is a thing to be achieved. At every 
step there are a thousand candidates who fail for 
every one who attains. Those who do attain remain 
in possession while they fulfil the conditions in the 
order where they are. Except a molecule of matter 
be born from above it cannot enter into life. Except 
the living animal be born from above it cannot be- 
come man. Except a man be born from above he 
cannot enter into the new kingdom. That is not 
first which is natural, but that which is spiritual. 

The later books of the New Testament, such as the 
Revelation of St. John and the apocalyptic portion 
of the Gospel of Matthew, throw little direct light 
upon the subject. While it is true that they con- 
cern themselves with the " last things ", it is also 
true that they wrote in a manner which was not 
intended to be taken for the face of it. The Apoca- 
l3^pse is obscure because it was meant to be obscure. 
The writers put in cryptogram things which it was 
not safe for Christians to discuss openly. No doubt 
it was intelligible to those to whom it was addressed, 
but the key has long since been lost. But it is prob- 
able that the book of Revelation, colored by the 
gorgeous but fine frenzied imaginations of Dante 



150 CHRISTIANITY 

and Milton, have done more than anything else to 
fix the popular notions concerning resurrection and 
the future life. The misfortune is that poetry has 
been mistaken for revelation and imagery for reality. 
But however firmly these Oriental pictures may be 
fixed in the popular mind, their reality has never 
been accepted as a part of the Christian faith. The 
Creed is content with saying that we " believe in the 
resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world 
to come ". No public creed earlier than the fourth 
century contains the clause, " the resurrection of the 
body ". 

The dramatic framework in which all this is set 
in apocalyptic scripture may be helpful or may be 
confusing just in proportion as one is or is not 
able to discriminate between the truth and the 
imagery. No end of error has been caused by con- 
fusing the one with the other. From this has come 
that series of mental pictures of universal death ; 
an underworld wherein all souls as phantoms wait 
through the ages ; a spectacular Judgment ; a pro- 
cession of redeemed to Elysium, and of condemned 
to Tartarus. Unless one's thought can escape from 
out this Dore gallery altogether, it will seek in vain 
for a reasonable as well as religious and holy hope 
of life beyond. 

If, however, this " way to immortality " be but 
the extension of the path of life which we may trace 
upward through nature, what specific and essential 
connection has it with Jesus of Nazareth? 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 151 

Birds which are born and bred in subarctic regions 
must perish unless they become able, at the proper 
time, to cross land and sea to a summer clime. 
Whether one of them shall be able to do this, de- 
pends upon its growth of wing, its instinct of direc- 
tion, and its strength to sustain flight. Between 
the one who can and the one who cannot is a differ- 
ence of a few millimeters' length of pinion and a few 
grains, more or less, of nourishment. The transit 
for the individual man from the present stage of 
being to the one which lies beyond we believe to be 
a question of the vigor of moral personality. Is 
there any reason to believe that the passage has 
ever been effected ? A single instance would be worth 
volumes of argument. It would bring the whole 
matter out of the abstract into the concrete. More- 
over, it would transform the lives of all those to 
whom such information might come. If we could 
find one single case of a man having passed through 
corporeal death, and having thereafter shown to liv- 
ing man by word or sight or speech that he is the 
same one who died, it would revolutionize human life. 
Above all, if he should give an intelligible account, 
not of where he has gone to, but of how he got 
there, the riddle of the universe would be read. It 
would be as though some one had found a practica- 
ble ford across an encompassing river which had al- 
ways been thought impassable. It would change the 
whole temper and manner of life of those who live 
this side. It would bring hope concerning the fate 



152 CHRISTIANITY 

of that multitude who had essayed the same crossing, 
and had seemed to have been drowned. 

There are now living several hundred millions of 
people who believe such a crossing to have been made. 
They believe that it occurred two thousand years 
ago, sometime between a Friday evening and a Sun- 
day morning, in the city of Jerusalem, and that the 
man's name was Jesus. I understand quite well how 
the scientific man and the student of evidences may 
feel like turning away with impatience at the mere 
suggestion. The event is so remote, the direct evi- 
dence so scanty, the event so incredible, that busy 
men cannot be expected to take it seriously. Maybe 
so. It is more than likely that a very moderate 
cross-examination would break down every witness, 
and would show contradiction in the testimony. But 
still the fact remains that millions of people have 
believed and do believe it to have been a real occur- 
rence. These are also people whose average intelli- 
gence is, upon the whole, higher than that of any 
equal number of people in the world. No like num- 
ber approach them in moral earnestness or in gen- 
eral truthfulness. If it be objected that their be- 
lief in the alleged reappearance of Jesus after his 
death is only an article of faith which they receive 
after they have on other grounds become Christians, 
then the question arises, What accounts for Chris- 
tianity? The world in Jesus' time did not look for 
a future life of the individual; to-day it looks for 
it even more universally than the facts warrant. 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 153 

What has caused the change? The cause is so evi- 
dent that no student of history questions it. It is 
due to the assured conviction of friends of Jesus 
that they saw him in his own person after his death. 
It is conceivable that they were mistaken. But in 
that case we have that stupendous fabric which we 
call Christianit}^, that complex structure of morals, 
social order, political energy, and religious power, 
resting upon nothing. Now, there is such a thing 
as a credulity of scepticism as well as a credulity of 
faith. The sensible man tries to avoid both, to look 
at things as they are, and in any case to accept 
the explanation which best explains. 

Let it be well understood right here that the 
question involved is not of the " supernatural " as 
opposed to the " natural ". If Jesus survived his 
own death it was because it was natural for him 
and such as he to do so. The antithesis of natural 
and supernatural is a mere imagination. The only 
true classification is the real and the unreal. What- 
ever is real is natural, for whenever its reahty is 
established the definition of nature must be extendeB 
to include it. 

Assuming the story of the Gospels to be honest — 
and no one doubts the honesty — it is clear that be- 
tween five hundred and a thousand of Jesus' friends 
who knew him in life believed that they had seen 
him again after his death. It must be acknowledged 
that the accounts are confused and in details con- 
tradictory, but in essentials they are clear enough. 



154 CHRISTIANITY 

The disciples were not looking for his reappearance, 
and were very slow to believe it when it occurred. 
They had thought this was he who should redeem 
Israel, but he had died, and their dream was at an 
end. Then something happened^ suddenly, which 
changed the whole situation for them and in con- 
sequence changed their whole lives. What was it 
that did happen? The vulgar answer is, — the dead 
body of Jesus came to life again, and their senses 
convinced them of the fact. But this is not the 
impression which the story gives when it is candidly 
examined. It is very curious that in every case 
the person to whom Jesus reappeared failed at first 
to recognize him. This was true of the two Marys, 
of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the com- 
pany in the upper room, and of all. " When they 
saw him they worshipped, but some were sceptical ". 
It is plain, however, that they had an experience 
of some kind wliich convinced them of his identity. 
Now, assuming, as we must, that the story is an 
honest one, it is a passing strange one. If it were 
told of an ordinary man, we could only look at it 
a little for its curiosity, and then dismiss it. Two 
considerations, however, preclude us from dealing 
with it after this rough and ready fashion. The 
first is that it is related to the previous life of a 
personality which is altogether remarkable. The 
second is that it has wrought such momentous results 
in the course of human history. The story is the 
essential element of the Christian Gospel. Remov- 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 155 

ing this eviscerates it. St Paul says plainly that 
if his Gospel should break down at this point it 
would be worthless. Even though Jesus might have 
lived and taught and suffered and died as he did, 
" if he be not risen again your faith is vain ". His 
argument was that the man Jesus had definitely 
realized the process whereby a human being might 
attain to the possession of a psychical life so exalted 
in quality and so tenacious in substance that cor- 
poreal death could not break it down ; that he had 
achieved this for himself at an incalculable cost ; that 
he had passed through death and conquered it, " hav- 
ing shown himself alive by many infallible proofs " ; 
and that he had become a kind of first fruits of a 
human harvest, which might be great or scanty as 
the event should prove. The primitive appeal of 
the Gospel was to the supreme aspiration of all 
organized creatures, the " lust of living ". This 
appeal is incalculably more potent than the one now 
commonly addressed to the love of happiness or the 
fear of misery. It explains at once the eager wel- 
come given to the Gospel in the early ages and the 
languid acceptance accorded to it now. No wonder 
Paul accounted all things " but dung that he might 
know Christ and the power of his resurrection and 
attain unto the resurrection of the dead ". And 
little wonder that men to-day who have fallen into 
the way of thinking that they are immortal anyway, 
will snatch at the pleasures of the life that now 
is, and trust to good fortune to escape any very 



156 CHRISTIANITY 

intolerable misery in that which is to come. But if 
it be true that the stake at issue is not either the 
pleasure or the pain of life, but life itself, the situa- 
tion becomes more tragic. 

At this point we come to face a very obstinate diffi- 
culty. In the continent of human history Christian- 
ity occupies but an insignificant space. It covers 
but two score out of the centuries of human progres- 
sion. Those who ever did or ever could have heard 
of our Master are but an infinitesimal fraction of 
that mighty host of human beings who have ap- 
peared upon and passed off the world's stage. A 
means of attaining immortality, therefore, which 
could only be available after a certain date A. U. C, 
and within a certain geographical area, could be 
only a mockery. It would be like a zoology whose 
laws would only hold within a thiergarten and be 
inapplicable to the beasts of the field. It would be 
little to call such a doctrine absurd, when we might 
justly characterize it as profoundly immoral. We 
are in search of a bridge by which it may be possible 
for individuals to pass from this present life to 
another. Common equity demands that the hither 
end of the bridge should be placed within the reach 
of the first man who could walk and who wished to 
cross. We cannot worthily imagine that the great 
Architect should either have postponed its construc- 
tion until countless generations should have perished 
on this side the flood, or that he should have placed 
it where it would be only available for an elect few. 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 157 

Let the conditions of eternal life be as inexorable as 
they may prove to be. We are familiar with that 
necessity at every stage of the organic movement. 
No one will gainsay a rigid selection of the individuals 
who live out of the multitudes who perish. But the 
one thing which the moral sense demands is that this 
selection shall be a natural and not an arbitrary 
one. Time was when devout men denounced the 
phrase " natural selection " because they fancied it 
circumscribed the action of God's intelligence. They 
did not realize the unspeakable relief it brings to a 
belief in God's righteousness. Even the gift of eter- 
nal life might scarcely be accepted at his hands if 
it came tainted with favoritism. " Whom he would 
he slew, and whom he would he kept alive ", may 
serve as the conception of God's character current 
at the court of Belshazzar, but the moral sense of 
to-day can only conceive thus of Baal. 

But are we not bound to hold that " there is 
none other name given under heaven among men 
whereby they may be saved but the name of the 
anointed Jesus " ? No doubt ; but this fact has wide 
implications which are seldom realized. If eternal 
life be in any actual way correlated with the Divine 
Man whom we adore, it must be in some way superior 
to times and dates and missionaries. If the Christ 
be the Son of Man to any effectual purpose, it can 
only be because he represents some force which is 
available under the same conditions to all men at 
all times. The " Life of the World " must be able 



158 CHRISTIANITY 

and ready to flow at any time and place where a 
physical organism is ready to receive it. The Divin- 
ity of Christ is an infinitely larger thing than the 
theologians know. Their schemes of " atonement " 
give us little or no help. They are all hopelessly 
artificial and unreal. They all attempt to state the 
function of the Christ in terms of Hebrew sacrifice 
and Roman law. One could as well construct a 
zoology in the same terms. Christian thought has 
been bewildered and Christian instinct wellnigh de- 
feated by the centuries of logically coherent but 
empty systems of doctrine concerning the work of 
Christ. His terms are biological; theirs are legal. 
It may be ages yet before we recover from the mis- 
fortune of having had the truth of Christ interpreted 
and fixed by jurists and logicians instead of by 
naturalists and men of science. It is much as 
though the rationale of the circulation of the blood 
had been described by Sir Matthew Hale, or the 
germ theory of disease interpreted by Blackstone, 
or the doctrine of evolution formulated by a legisla- 
tive council. Religious thought is everywhere striv- 
ing to escape from the dreary fortress of law to the 
open world of nature. I venture to think that Dar- 
win and the martyrs of science have done more to 
make the words of Christ intelligible than have 
Athanasius and the theologians. It is little less than 
marvellous, the way in which the words of Jesus fit 
in with the forms of thought which are to-day cur- 
rent. They are life, generation, survival of the fit, 



THE FIRST TO CROSS 159 

tree and fruit, multiplication by cell growth as 
leaven, operation by chemical contact as salt, dying 
of the lonely seed to produce much fruit, imposition 
of a higher form of life upon a lower by being born 
from above, grafting a new scion upon a wild stock, 
the phenomena of plant growth from the seed through 
the blade and the ear to the matured grain, and, 
finally, the attainment of an individual life which 
is eternal. The claim made for the Son of Man 
is that he has to do with this vital process in a vital 
fashion from the beginning of the ages to the end 
of them. This claim may or may not be more 
difficult for thoughtful men to admit than the claim 
that he wrought out a means of legal escape for a 
chosen few from a judicial sentence. But whatever 
difficulty does attach to it is an intellectual and not 
an ethical one. 



BODIES CELESTIAL 



" The great significance of the individual man fairly 
raises the presumption that his place in Nature has a 
meaning that is not to be measured by the length of his 
life in the body. Looking, as we must do, for a purpose 
that justifies to our understanding all this doing of Na- 
ture, is it not reasonable to suppose that one at least 
of these purposes is attained in the creation of these 
personalities? And may we not fairly regard these 
persons as containing and preserving the permanent 
gain which comes from the work of the visible uni- 
verse "? — Shaler, " The Individual ". 



BODIES CELESTIAL 

So far as we can see, a living personality without 
a body is impossible ; a " disembodied spirit " is un- 
thinkable. This is why the question of the " resur- 
rection of the dead " becomes of such supreme im- 
portance. The contribution which Christianity has 
made to belief in a future life is bound up with 
material quite as much as spiritual phenomena. 
People had for ages before Christ a notion of some 
kind of a nebulous and phantasmal survival of the 
personality, but the belief was at its best practically 
inoperative. A spirit with no material organ for 
expressing itself puts to confusion all our concep- 
tions of what a human being is. The body is just 
as essential a component part of our idea of a man 
as the soul is. It is just as easy to think of the 
body becoming immortal without a soul as of the 
soul being immortal without a body. This is why 
the physiologist finds it so difficult to believe in 
the immortality of the soul. It is only because he 
sees more clearly than other men do the constant 
and essential interdependence of soul and body. The 
ground of his scepticism is sound. There is no 
known form of energy separate from matter. The 

163 



164 CHRISTIANITY 

soul cannot flit across the river naked. Nor is it 
any relief to think of it as existing even temporarily 
in a quiescent state while waiting for a resurrected 
body. It cannot wait. An individual life must be 
continuous or else not be at all. It cannot stop and 
go on again. The Easter images of the egg and the 
butterfly will not bear examination. The caterpillar, 
the imago, and the butterfly are all included in one 
cycle, to be sure, but the continuity of the individual 
is broken at each stage of the progression, and the 
cycle when completed returns upon itself. It goes 
nowhere. What we are in search of is a continuous 
life of the individual. To this end St. Paul affirais 
that there is a natural body and there is a spiritual 
body. If so, where is it.? How does it grow.^^ What 
are its qualities.'^ What is its relation to what we 
call matter.? What reason has the Apostle for mak- 
ing his assertion.? His reason is obvious; he asserts 
that there is a " spiritual " body because he has 
seen one. 

The nature of Jesus' reappearance may be exam- 
ined without irreverence because we are so deeply 
concerned to know the facts and their significance. 
The Gospels represent the risen Christ as a living 
man like other men, and at the same time strangely 
unlike, and they make no attempt to adjust the con- 
tradiction. He is independent of the laws of mat- 
ter, and at the same time he conforms to some of 
them. He suddenly appears in a lighted room whose 
doors remain locked, but at the same time they think 



BODIES CELESTIAL 165 

they see him eat and drink. Again, he communi- 
cates with them by means of some kind of spoken 
language, but at the same time is invisible. They 
see him and take him for a stranger, but the next 
moment they recognize him. We seem, in a word, 
to be in the presence of something which is both 
material and immaterial, something which is cogniza- 
ble by the senses, and which at the same time plays 
fast and loose with sense perceptions. There would 
seem to be only two reasonable attitudes toward the 
story open to us. Either we may dismiss it as an 
Oriental fantasy, or we must extend our definitions 
of nature to include its phenomena. Of course one 
may, if he so please, look at it from a distance as 
a sacred region into which curiosity dare not enter 
and where faith alone is admissible. But there is 
such a thing as sitting down at the entrance of a 
holy ground under pretence of putting off one's 
shoes, while the real motive is indolence or fear. If 
the phenomena under consideration are facts at all, 
they are facts which are meant for use. We may 
rightly " have boldness to enter into the holiest, 
by a new and living way which he hath consecrated 
for us through the veil, that is to say his flesh ". 

The most significant feat which modern science has 
accomplished has been to establish the existence of 
that strange substance known as interstellar ether. 
Its existence had long been suspected, now it is 
known. Sir Isaac Newton closes his " Principia " 
with this prophetic paragraph: — 



166 CHRISTIANITY 

"And now we might add something concerning a most 
subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; 
by the force and attraction of which spirit the particles of 
bodies mutually attract one another, and electric bodies sepa- 
rate, and light is emitted, and all sensation is excited, and 
the members of animal bodies move at the command of the 
will by vibrations of this spirit propagated along the solid 
filaments of the nerves. But these things cannot be explained 
in a few words, nor are we furnished with that suflSciency 
of experiments necessary to an accurate determination and 
demonstration of the laws by which this subtle spirit operates ". 



Now, this " subtle spirit " of Sir Isaac has been 
shown to be not spirit at all, but a material medium 
which fills all space and interpenetrates all matter. 
The result has rendered necessary a new definition 
of Matter. Extension, ponderability, form, dimen- 
sion, and such qualities are no longer sufficient to 
define it. " Empty " space can no longer be spoken 
of, for no portion of space is empty. It can no 
longer be said that " no two portions of matter can 
occupy the same space at the same time ". Indeed, 
it seems to be the very condition of existence of the 
matter which we see that it should lie bathed in a 
matter which we do not see. For this universal 
ether is matter. It shows some of the properties 
of a most tenuous fluid, in other respects it acts as 
an infinitely dense solid, and in still others as jelly. 
It is the material medium through which light, elec- 
tricity, and radiant energy are conducted by waves 
of differing length, and probably what we call grav- 
itation also. Its waves flow through the densest 



BODIES CELESTIAL 167 

material known like water through a sieve. It ap- 
pears, indeed, to be the instrument in and through 
which all the elemental forces, light, heat, electricity, 
chemical energy, do their work. May not vital 
energy be concerned with it as well? 

It is not easy to understand why the physicists 
are so reluctant to admit the objective existence of 
such a force as " Vital Energy ". Surely there are 
abundant phenomena which cannot be classified under 
any other form of energy known. Allowing that the 
phrase is only a name for a set of phenomena whose 
essential nature is not understood, that much may 
also be said of all the other categories of energy. 

Each thought we think, each emotion we feel, is 
associated with molecular changes and rearrange- 
ments in the brain. But this material fabric of 
thought is every moment disintegrating, and at death 
falls into ruin. Now, suppose that before that ruin 
befalls, the soul shall have been able to build up 
of some more enduring substance, as it were, a brain 
within the brain, a body within the body, something 
like that which the Orientals have for ages spoken 
of as the Astral Body. Then, when the body of 
flesh shall be laid aside, there would remain a body, 
material to be sure, but compacted of a kind of 
matter which behaves quite differently from that 
which our sense perceptions deal with. It is a 
material which, so far as science has anything to 
say, is essentially indestructible. It moves freely 
amongst and through ordinary matter without let 



168 CHRISTIANITY 

or hindrance. One can at any rate picture to him- 
self a life of this Ethereal sort. From the individual 
spirits of just men made perfect this present 
" muddy vesture of decay " has fallen away, leaving 
them " not unclothed but clothed upon ". They are 
still men. They have rational souls with material 
bodies fit to sustain and to express their psychical 
life. The matter of their bodies is obedient to the 
laws of matter and life, but to the laws of that kind 
of life and matter. There are celestial bodies, and 
there are bodies terrestrial, and each has its own 
mode of action. Such Ethereal bodies compacted 
with living souls would of necessity inhabit a uni- 
verse of their own, even though that universe should 
occupy the same space that this one does. Neither 
earth nor fire nor water could impede their move- 
ment. In frost and flame they would be equally at 
home. With the swiftness of light or gravitation 
they would speed from where old Bootes leads his 
leash to where Sagitarius draws his bow in the 
south. With bodies of such fine stuff compounded, 
and so plastic to the uses of the spirit, their knowl- 
edge would expand until Nature's secrets should lie 
open to their eyes. Their senses would be so acute 
and so delicately balanced as to be capable of thrills 
of pleasure so transcendent and of pain so poignant, 
that the experiences of this life give no measure 
to estimate them by. Love could have its perfect 
way where there would be perfect comprehension. 
In this present stage no personality ever knows very 



BODIES CELESTIAL 169 

much of any other. Each is shut within a body 
which at best can only partially reveal it. And the 
mind is continually weighed down and retarded by 
the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. No doubt 
the Ethereal body is subject to its own ills. But 
with it as the vehicle for their expression, love and 
knowledge must have opened to them possibilities, 
not infinite indeed, but so extended that we may not 
even try to guess their limits. 

All this is based upon two premises, first, that 
any possible future life must be an embodied life; 
and, second, that there exists such a material stuif 
as may serve the uses and needs of such a life. It 
is an hypothesis. But eA^ery advancing step of 
knowledge is gained by an hypothesis. If the theory 
be found to bring into coherence facts which are 
known to be facts, and make them coherent and 
intelligible, and lead to the discovery of still other 
facts, it slowly changes from an hypothesis to a 
conviction. Will this one bear that test? 

Let us see first to what extent it fits the language 
of the New Testament. 



" For we know that if the earthen fabric of our tent be 
dissolved, we have a building from God, a fabric not made 
with hands, eternal, in the heavens. For truly in this we 
groan being burdened, not for that we would be unclothed, 
but clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up 
in life. We faint not, but though our outward man is decay- 
ing, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. All flesh 
is not the same flesh, there is one flesh of men, another of 
beasts, another of birds, so there are celestial bodies and 



170 CHRISTIANITY 

bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial is one, and 
the glory of the terrestrial is another. So also is the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in 
incorruption ; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual 
body. There is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 
The first man is of the earth, earthen, the second man is of 
heaven. As we have borne the image of the earthy we shall 
also bear the image of the heavenly. For the earnest expecta- 
tion of the creature waiteth for the revealing of the sons of 
God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain with us until now. And not only so, but 
we ourselves which have the first fruit of the spirit groan 
within ourselves waiting for the adoption, that is to say, 
the setting free of the body ". " And Jesus was transfigured 
before them, and his face did shine as the sun, and his 
raiment was white as light, and behold, there appeared unto 
them Moses and Elias talking with him ". " And it came to 
pass as he sat at meat with them he took bread and blessed 
and brake it, and their eyes were opened and they knew him, 
and he slowly disappeared from their sight ". " I know a man 
in Christ, whether in the body or out of the body I know 
not, caught up into paradise, and he heard things of which it 
is not possible for a man to speak". "From henceforth let 
no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of 
Jesus Christ ". 

Such quotations might be extended indefinitely, 
but these are enough to show that the companions 
and survivors of Jesus looked with confidence for a 
future life of such sort that their spirits would not 
be left naked, but clothed upon with some kind of 
material substance which was even then being woven 
for them in the secret place of their own being. 
Whether or not the Ethereal stuff which science now 
knows does or does not prove to be that which may 
serve as the physical basis of a continued personal 



BODIES CELESTIAL 171 

life, it may fairly be said that it enables us to 
conceive of such a life, and that is much. The late 
Professor Cope in his " Origin of the Fittest " asks, 
" Is there any generalized form of matter diffused 
through the universe which could then sustain con- 
sciousness ? " and answers, " The presumption is that 
such a form of matter may well exist." 

According to this view the putting on of immor- 
tality is in no wise the passage from a material to 
a spiritual state. It is the passage from one kind 
of a materially conditioned state to another. In this 
is where its strength lies. It turns away from that 
unthinkable region of disembodied spirit. We shrink 
from disembodied being with a repugnance which 
cannot be overcome by any argument. Much as we 
may yearn for immortality, we w^ould rather miss it 
than possess it under conditions of which we can 
form no conception and which terrify by their 
strangeness. 

The late Professor Shaler, Dean of the Scientific 
Facult}^ of Harvard, says, " A number of men of 
no mean authority as naturalists, some of them well 
trained in experimental science, have after long and 
apparently careful inquir}^ become convinced that 
there is evidence of the survival of some after death ". 
This is a conclusion which sensible men will reach very 
hesitatingly. The evidence, if evidence it can be 
called, is found by an analj^sis of that enormous but 
unsavory mass of Spiritism, Occultism, Telepathy, 
Il3'pnotism, and such like. It is a material witli wlilcji 



172 CHRISTIANITY 

sane men are reluctant to deal. It is so contaminated 
with fraud, charlatanism, credulity, and hysterics 
that one's natural inclination is to pass by it as far 
on the other side of the way as the width of the road 
will allow. But at the same time it must be allowed 
that there is a growing willingness to admit that 
there is " something in it ". It is not easy to find 
even an educated man who will categorically deny 
that there are instances wherein one personality com- 
municates with another without physical media of 
intercourse. At any rate the belief in hypnotic sug- 
gestion and telepathic communication has come to 
be quite general. The proof is very difficult to come 
at. When one arises from reading the reports of 
the Society for Psychical Research or the experi- 
ments of the physical psychologists he is apt to find 
himself in a very exasperating mental state. He has 
the feeling that he is here in the presence of some 
kind of natural phenomena which are real but which 
are being exploited by the wrong people. He is 
not much better satisfied when he finishes the report 
of a Seybert Commission of lawyers and scientists ap- 
pointed by a great university to investigate the 
alleged facts. If the one set is too credulous, the 
other is too dogmatic. 

The truth would seem to be that we are beginning 
to take serious account of a set of unclassified 
psychical phenomena which correspond very closely 
with a newly described set of physical phenomena. 
The unthinking person is prone to regard such things 



BODIES CELESTIAL 173 

as the X-Ray and wireless telegraphy and radiant 
energy as only inventions or discoveries which are 
only a httle more wonderful, but not differing in 
kind from a thousand others which have gone before. 
This misapprehends their significance. They are 
phenomena in an entirely new region; doors opened 
into a new universe. It is a material universe, to 
be sure, and one which we see now to have been 
always about us. Its existence had long been sus- 
pected, but there was no proof, and there did not 
seem to be any organ or faculty by which proof could 
be made. It is a universe where the ordinary laws 
of matter are inoperative, indeed appear to be non- 
existent, but of its reality no one thinks of doubting. 
Now, coinciding with these new and strange discov- 
eries in the physical sphere there appear to be equally 
strange phenomena in the psychical sphere. Is it 
unreasonable to believe that the two are in some way 
correlated? That living mind can and does, under 
certain conditions, act upon other living minds with- 
out the medium of matter can hardly any longer 
be doubted. Whether it be a " departed " spirit 
touching a living one, or one living one touching 
another, seems to me to be of very little consequence. 
The one is antecedently just as probable or as im- 
probable as the other. But so far all indications 
point to the belief that such equivocal phenomena 
have their place in a region which is not spiritual 
in the sense in which that term is generally used, 
but in one which is material, though not in the sense 



174 CHRISTIANITY 

which that word ordinarily connotes. In a word, 
the last discover}^ in physics and the last experiment 
in psychology appear to function in the same region. 
The w^ay in w^hich all this concerns our theory of 
another life ought now to be evident. If that life 
be one which involves and requires a material basis, 
and demands it at a time when the matter which 
ordinarily serves the spirit for its exjDression shall 
not be available, it is much to be even thus tenta- 
tively convinced that spirit can function under other 
conditions than those which belong to the ordinary 
life of man. It gives point and direction to ancient 
and widespread, but vague and unfruitful, hopes and 
beliefs. As Professor Shaler judiciously says: — 

" Notwithstanding this disinclination to meddle or be muddled 
by the problems of spiritism, the men of science have a 
natural interest in the inquiries of the few true observers 
who are dredging in that dirty sea. Trusting to the evident 
scientific faithfulness of these hardy explorers, it appears 
evident that they have brought up from that deep certain facts 
which, though still shadow^ed by doubt, indicate the persistence 
of the individual consciousness after death. It has, more- 
over, to be confessed that these few as yet imperfect ob- 
servations are fortified by the fact that through all the ages 
of his contact with nature man has firmly held to the notion 
that the world was peopled with disembodied individualities 
which could appeal to his own intelligence. Such a conviction 
is worth something, though it be little. Supported by any 
critical evidence it becomes of much value. Thus we may 
fairly conjecture that we may be on the verge of something 
like a demonstration that the individual consciousness does 
survive the death of the body by which it was nurtured ".^ 

^ " The Individual ". 



THE MORAL EFFECT 



" It is certainly hard to see how hope can be based ! 
on an external power brought to bear on man's nature, 

forcing it into a line of action with which it has no \ 

affinity. This conception of compulsory goodness has \ 

nothing in common with the Biblical view of man's re- j 

lation to divine influence. The power of Christianity | 

lies not in the fear of hell^ or even in the hope of any j 

heaven ". — Bruce_, " The Moral Order of the World ". j 



XI 
THE MORAL EFFECT 

There is a practical question which we may con- 
sider now. No moral or religious belief can be 
adopted or rejected without some regard to the effect 
which it may reasonably be expected to produce upon 
the conduct of those who entertain it. How will the 
doctrine of immortability as distinguished from im- 
mortality affect men's moral life? If we say to 
them, — " You are not naturally immortal, but you 
may become so if you set about it properly ", and 
if they believe us, will they be the better or the worse 
for it? Of course the intrinsic truth of the doctrine 
does not depend upon such a consideration. That 
must stand or fall on other grounds. If it be true 
men must adjust themselves to it as best they may. 
Truth is neither made or unmade by an estimate of 
its consequences. But at the same time, when one 
is endeavoring to determine whether or not such a 
proposition be true, he cannot but be influenced by 
his judgment of its practical result. 

It is quite commonly taken for granted that a gen- 
eral belief in the necessary immortality of all men, 
with the proffer of an eternal heaven and the threat 
of an eternal hell, is essential to the moral order of 

177 



178 CHRISTIANITY 

society. It is unquestionable that this common be- 
lief has been a powerful deterrent from evil at some 
times and within certain limited areas. It operated 
thus in Europe during the Middle Ages, and it does 
so to some extent in the territory of Islam to-day. 
But all will agree that the righteousness thus evoked 
is of a very unsatisfactory quality. 

" The fear o' hell's a hangman's whip 
To hand the wretch in order ". 

It has never succeeded in being more than that. 
Reward and penalty have been exploited to the 
utmost for moral purposes. The joys of heaven have 
been painted in forms most alluring and colors most 
ravishing ; the picture of hell with its lurid torments 
has been drawn by the hands of the world's most 
transcendent geniuses. But the result has always 
been amazingly meagre in its effect upon men's con- 
duct. While it has fired a few with an ecstatic long- 
ing and overwhelmed a few in a deadly terror, the 
great multitude, even while they assent to the truth 
of the doctrine, live as though it were non-existent. 
In our time it may well be doubted whether its 
effect is appreciable. It is generally allowed even 
by the most orthodox that the exploitation of a 
" material " hell and a " material " heaven has been 
a mistake. But they do not appear to notice that 
when the " material " element is eliminated from the 
idea nothing is left of it. If it is not material it 
is nothing. Its practical effect, where it has had 



TPIE MORAL EFFECT 179 

any, has been due to the way m which it allured or 
frightened the imagination. But to do this it must 
be presented in forms with which the imagination can 
deal. If its form be lacking its substance is gone. 
The attempt to substitute purely spiritual pleasures 
and spiritual pains for the crude glories of heaven 
and horrors of hell must always be unsuccessful. In 
point of fact the whole presentation of future reward 
and penalty has ceased to move. The awards and 
the sentences are felt to be irrelevant. The whole 
scheme is mechanical and artificial. It rests upon 
presumptions which are so unreasonable and inequit- 
able that advance in intelligence and moral clarity 
renders them intolerable. The classification of 
" righteous " and " wicked " is the merest figment — 
no objective fact corresponds to it. If it be as- 
sumed that every man, without regard to his stage 
of moral development, passes on into another life 
which is endless by its very nature, the sense of fair 
dealing demands that he should be left unclassified 
and undoomed until he has reached the end of his line 
of moral progress. This is indeed the explicit teach- 
ing of Jesus as to those who are capable of passing 
on at all. The wheat and the tares grow together 
until the end of the seon. But this natural process 
of life, growth, and development culminating in stable 
being or in disintegration, has nothing in common 
with the scheme of probation, trial, judgment, ac- 
quittal, and sentence. It is the plain fact that when- 
ever the belief becomes current that a future life of 



180 CHRISTIANITY 

some sort is assured for all in any event, men will 
conclude to wait till that life is reached before be- 
ginning any very strenuous effort to determine its 
character. 

If, on the other hand, we follow the teaching of 
Christ and of Nature, we find a moral dynamic which 
is quite incalculable, and from which there is no 
escape. Compared with its dire exhibition of de- 
struction following in the path of moral offence, the 
threat of hell is but the rattling of a medicine man's 
gourd. Let a man once see that the alternative 
which confronts him at every step of his moral pro- 
gression is life or death, that his task is, as Christ 
says, to " win for himself a soul ", or at a farther 
stage, to " save his soul alive ", and he will realize 
that he is face to face with realities and not with 
an extraneous arrangement arbitrarily established. 
The appeal is to that deepest, strongest, most per- 
sistent of all desires, the love of life. " Skin for 
skin, yea all that a man hath will he give for his 
life ". Once moral self-consciousness has been 
reached by the individual, his instinct of self-preser- 
vation may confidently be depended upon to induce 
strenuous action to protect himself from death, un- 
less he be misled by some outside assurance that death 
is not for him a possible issue. 

It may well be that suicide is possible for a human 
soul at every stage of its history, here or yonder. 
Indeed, it is not easy to conceive the possibility of a 
conscious personality being kept alive against its 



THE MORAL EFFECT 181 

own determination to make an end of itself. Such 
a condition of existence would seem to contradict the 
very idea of personality. It may be that God is no 
more able to force a man to live than to force him 
to love. There are places where coercion defeats 
itself. Certainly it is true now that every man holds 
in his hand the power to slay himself if he will. 
One wonders sometimes why the power is not more 
frequently used. Hamlet was mistaken in his ex- 
planation, — 'tis not " the dread of something after 
death which makes us rather bear the ills we have 
than fly to others we know not of ". 'Tis not be- 
cause " resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast 
of thought ". The resolve upon self-destruction is 
reached more reluctantly by the brutal savage who 
has no thought of anything beyond than it is by 
the educated man whose imagination is crowded with 
pictures of post-obituary horrors. The elemental 
instinct of living may be trusted to keep one from 
making his own quietus, wherever he may be. The 
horror of ceasing to be is a far more powerful emo- 
tion than the fear of damnation. If fear be needed 
at all, or be efficacious at all, to the evocation of 
goodness, here is a form of disaster compared to 
which the fear of hell is but a bogie to frighten 
children. 

The continuance of any individual in being is 
dependent upon his conforming to the conditions of 
life at the stage where he is. St. Paul has set out 
in a most precise statement what are the laws for 



182 CHRISTIANITY 

the kind of beings which most of us at any rate 
have come to be. When one has reached that point 
of moral progress which he describes by the phrase, 
" being in Christ Jesus ", he has passed out from 
under the lower law binding upon creatures who 
have not reached so far. " For they that are after 
the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they 
that are after the spirit the things of the spirit. 
For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of 
the spirit is life. The mind of the flesh is not sub- 
ject to this higher law of God, indeed it cannot be. 
But ye are not in the flesh but in the spirit, pro- 
vided that the spirit of God inhabiteth you. If the 
spirit of him that raised up Christ from the dead 
be in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the 
dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through 
the spirit that dwelleth in you. So then, brethren, 
we are under obligation not to the flesh to live after 
the flesh; for if ye live after the flesh ye are bound 
to die; but if by the spirit ye mortify the flesh ye 
shall live ". 

This is the key to the marvellous welcome with 
which the world hailed the " Good news of the Gospel 
of the resurrection " ; to the languid indifference with 
which the gospel of escape from hell is received to- 
da}^; to the new enthusiasm for righteousness which 
might be expected to burst forth once more if men 
were brought to see that holiness is the very path 
to abiding life. 



THE NEW CREATION 



" Thyself and thy belongings 
Are not thine own so proper as to waste 
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. 
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, 
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues 
Do not go forth of us, 'twere all alike 
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touched 
But to fine issues ". 

— ** Measure for Measure ". 



XII 

THE NEW CREATION 

The word " Christian " is really one of the most 
vague and ill-defined terms in common use. The 
definitions of it which have been made are as a rule 
either so confused as to be valueless, or so precise 
as to be untrue. Is the " Christian " simply one 
who is " better " than his neighbors ? Or is he one 
who has been admitted to membership in the Or- 
ganization by the initiatory sacrament? Or is he 
one who has passed through some special phase of 
emotional experience? The reply is, All these defi- 
nitions are irrelevant. They are like attempts to 
express a chemical compound in feet and inches, to 
describe a polyp or a marsupial in musical notation, 
to measure a mother's grief by a chemical analysis 
of her tears, to define a human child in terms of 
geometry. The fact exists in one realm; the defini- 
tions are drawn from another. If, however, we re- 
place the whole matter in the region where it be- 
longs, the perplexity disappears. 

The practical evil of this confusion is incalculable. 
With the best will possible, men do not know how 
to set about the matter. Their conduct in the 
sphere of religion shows a strange lack of purpose 

185 



186 CHRISTIANITY 

and plan. In other things men know what they 
want, what they are trying to do; here they are 
vague and, as a consequence, ineffective. Many 
leave it alone altogether on this very account. It is 
probably the case that religion occupies a far smaller 
space in everyday life within Christendom than it 
does in heathen men's hves. The Mohammedan or 
the Hindoo allows to it a far larger measure of 
activity. This is not because he is more religious 
than we, but because religion is for him far more 
clearly defined. His course of action is clear, and 
is followed because it is clear. Among us it is not 
so. Multitudes are kept away from Christianity a 
thousand times more by its apparent elusiveness 
than by its moral exactions or its mystery. " What 
shall I do to inherit eternal life ".^ is the eternal 
cry of the earnest soul. But to this eager inquiry 
there is no answer forthcoming which he sees how 
to act upon. Jesus' answer seems to have been 
strangely lost sight of. What that is we will 
have to examine again. But in its absence what we 
see all about us is a curious indefiniteness of aim 
in religious movement. It is not at all " inconsist- 
ency ", that is, failure of correspondence between 
profession and practice. It is action which is with- 
out definite purpose, movement which goes nowhere. 
The practical man either leaves it aside altogether, 
or he commits himself to a mechanical ecclesiasticism, 
or he trusts to an unethical revivalism. He thinks 
of religion as submission to a code, or as subscrip- 



THE NEW CREATION 18*7 

tion to a creed, or as an emotional experience, or 
as some combination of all three. 

Jesus presents it as the life which is characteristic 
of a " Kingdom ". Now, a kingdom, in nature, is a 
very complex and mysterious thing, but its phe- 
nomena are unmistakable. Let us take, for exam- 
ple, the Animal Kingdom. Its frontiers are not 
sharply defined. Between it and the Vegetable King- 
dom next below there is a debatable land, how ex- 
tended no man knows. There are a myriad forms 
of life, as yet too little developed to allow one to 
say which kingdom contains them. This kingdom 
contains within its borders forms as widely unlike 
in manner and experience as the Amoeba and the 
Man, together with all forms between. The quality 
which all the forms possess in common is that thing 
which we call animal life. It has a thousand methods 
of generation, but the thing generated is always of 
the same kind, — a living, animal form. Its most 
highly organized product is Man. But within that 
form there is also immeasurable diversity, — from 
the individual hardly distinguishable from the brute, 
to the man a little lower than the angels. The 
Christian Principia is that the germs of a higher 
type of life lie latent in Humanity; they develop 
after a law of their own; that Christ is organically 
connected with this process of development; and 
that the new creature is the Christian. Is it pos- 
sible then to recognize this new creature when he 
appears ? 



188 CHRISTIANITY 

There is one significant fact which the naturalist 
has learned in studying the evolution of species. 
That is, a new form does not take its start from the 
summit of the form next below it. The divergent 
path which issues in a higher being takes its de- 
parture at a point far below that place. The lind 
of evolution, for example, which culminates in Man, 
when traced backward is found to intersect the trunk 
of the tree of Hfe at a place much below that where 
the Simian lives. By analogy, therefore, we may 
not look for the beginnings of the " new life " at 
the top of human attainment. It must be sought 
for among meek and lowly beginnings. We may 
expect it to be present at a stage where the intelli- 
gence is but little developed, where all human powers 
and faculties are relatively low. " For not many 
wise, not many noble, not many mighty are chosen, 
but God hath chosen the foolish and the weak things 
of the world to put to shame the things which are 
strong ". And Jesus announces that " God hath hid 
these things from the wise and understanding, and 
hath revealed them unto babes ". 

Whatever " that manner of life which was also in 
Jesus Christ " may prove to be, we may expect to 
find it compatible with a modest degree of intellectual 
development. To identify the " Christian " we must 
look not only for a higher life than that which 
Humanity has already exhibited, but for a different 
type of life. The disciples of Jesus were not " bet- 
ter " men than their contemporaries ; they had be- 



THE NEW CREATION 189 

come a different kind of men. They probably com- 
pared but illy with Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or 
" the sweet Gallio ". They were men of limited in- 
telligence and faulty character. This feature is 
strikingly true of Christianity so far as its history 
is contained within the New Testament. St. Paul 
addresses his converts as " saints ", " new creatures ", 
and in the same breath rebukes them for flagrant 
moral lapses. He regrets that they are but new- 
born babes of the new order, and can only be fed 
with milk and not strong meat. All that the new 
life demands is a human personality developed far 
enough to make its beginning possible. 

The New Life attaches itself to human nature 
at the point where the moral sense emerges into 
self-consciousness. In its essence it is un-self-ish^ 
ness. In the natural man the soul is divided between 
the " will to live " and the " will to love ". Led by 
the one he strives continually to conquer all things 
to his own ends. He looks toward himself, and 
must ultimately be defeated and perish because the 
universe is hostile, and is too strong for him. Led 
by the other he emerges from himself, becomes at 
home in the universe, and akin to God. The first 
self-consciousness of this kinship is the " new birth ". 
Like all new-born things it is feeble, and its motions 
are reflexive rather than voluntary, but it has been 
born. It feels outward with hesitating fingers, not 
to clutch the universe, but to caress it. But, it will 
be asked, Is not this true of every one? I reply, no, 



190 CHRISTIANITY 

not every man. Until this stage is reached love is 
lust, the power to possess and enjoy. If it be 
asked, Does any man do it, I reply, Yes, the New 
Man does, and this is the test by which he is identi- 
fied. The classic statement of the doctrine is in the 
First Epistle of St. John. No more profound utter- 
ance is extant in philosophy or biology: — 

" The Word of life was manifested, and we have seen and 
bear witness unto you the eternal life which was with the 
Father and was manifested unto us. That which ye have seen 
and heard we declare unto you, that ye also may have 
fellowship with the Father and with his son Jesus the Christ. 
For Love is of God, and every one that loveth is begotten 
of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not 
God. And the witness is this, that God gave unto us the 
eternal life, and this life is in his son. He that hath the son 
hath life and he that hath not the son hath not life. These 
things have I written that ye may know that ye have eternal 
life ". 

The " Christian ", then, is the human being who 
is identified by his peculiar habit, viz., his will to 
live being subordinated to his will to love. This sets 
him in a new relation to both the spiritual and the 
physical universe. 

But if this is the case, were there not Christians 
long before Christ, and in regions where no word of 
him has ever reached.'^ Undoubtedly. The place 
of Christ in the New Order is not the beginning of 
a series but the centre of a circle. From Galilee 
he moves outward in every direction, not only in 
space, but in time as well. The " Divinity of 



THE NEW CREATION 19,1 

Christ " is a far larger thing than even Orthodoxy 
reahzes. If eternal life be correlated organically 
with the Son of Man whom we adore, it must be in 
some way which is superior to times and dates, and 
which is not contingent upon missionaries. We may 
not present him as eternal, and at the same time as 
fixed within history and geography. The New Man 
must have appeared in the upward progress of 
humanity at a date long before God's experiment 
with human living in the time of Tiberius Caesar. 
We may not allow the need of theological coherence 
to shut the doors of the Kingdom against " Noah, 
Daniel, and Job ", or their kind of any kin. The 
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God 
of the dead but the living. Christianity means that 
whoever, anywhere, or at any time, has attained to a 
spiritual life which manifests certain qualities has 
attained onto that life whose laws and phenomena 
are exemplified in him " of whom the whole family 
in heaven and earth is called ". 

There is another and a perplexing aspect of our 
theme which we may not evade. The New Man, 
whom we have been trying to identify and describe, 
exists actually in such rudimentary and incomplete 
shape, and passes out of life so far from complete. 
" Some are weak and sickly among you, and some 
are asleep ". What of them ? What of the unde- 
veloped child, the feeble-minded and the feeble- 
souled, that great multitude who, so far as we can 
see, have been born from above, have the will to love, 



192 CHRISTIANITY 

but have been so let and hindered in the race set 
before them that they must needs pass on, if they 
pass at all, like Richard the hunchback complained 
that he had been sent into this life, " scarce half 
made up "? Frankly speaking, I do not believe this 
difficulty would ever have been felt except for the 
presence of a meagre and poverty-stricken concep- 
tion of existence to which an unworthy theology has 
given currency. Without any warrant of God or of 
Scripture or the reasonableness of things, it shuts 
up the whole movement of man within the compass 
of two stadia, " this life " and " the next ". Then 
it assumes that this one is the period of " probation ", 
within which the final destiny of every living thing 
is wrought out and fixed. No conceivable interest 
is served by this narrow and artificial scheme of 
things except that of logical definition. The New 
Testament has no such constricted outlook. It deals 
with realities and has little thought of consistency. 
Existence is far too large a thing to be seen con- 
sistently. The general conception of the New Testa- 
ment is that the new life of the individual is begun 
here, and that he passes on, incomplete, into an ex- 
istence where the same laws of being operate as do 
through time and space. 

Life cannot subsist anywhere without movement, 
progress. Arrest means disintegration. By what 
warrant may we confine the successive phases of 
being to two, or to any number? We are concerned 
now only with the transit from this one to the next. 



THE NEW CREATION 193 

but we can only think of the individual as passing 
on into actual development and real vicissitude. 
Jesus is bold to make Dives develop morally under 
the scorching discipline of hell. He becomes there 
a better man. He reaches the point where he can 
take thought of his brethren, about whom he had 
not concerned himself in this life. Even the souls 
of the " saints under the altar " are morally lacking 
the while they call upon God for vengeance on their 
persecutors. The next life must either be a real 
life, for real persons, with real experience, or else 
be dismissed as the work of a fever and the delirium 
of a dream. Human life without moral movement 
is inconceivable at any stage. It is the law of its 
being. Where in any case the new life is vigorous 
and stable enough to persist at all, its rudimentary, 
feeble, and incomplete forms cannot but move in 
that direction which is determined by their nature 
and their choice. 

The practical question is a narrower, though 
maybe not less difficult one. 

What is the essential note or mark of the Christian 
in the world in which we actually live? The oppro- 
brium of Christianity has always been the Christians. 
May it not be that something has been looked for 
in them which by their nature is not theirs? The 
function of the individual Christian in human society 
has been variously conceived. Is it his task to be 
a model for conduct? Or to be an active reformer 
of manners? Or to be an administrator of alms? 



194 CHRISTIANITY 

Or to be a herald of new truth? He has been praised 
and blamed equally for taking and for refusing any 
or all of these roles. Shall we follow the ascetic 
and say that the " religious " are they who separate 
themselves from men and live by rule? Shall we 
listen to Tolstoi and strip ourselves of property, 
resent no injury, abjure courts of justice, refuse 
to bear a sword? Shall we follow the beckoning 
finger of the sociologist into the study of life with 
a view of bettering its conditions? Shall we join 
the philanthropists to distribute bread and pro\dde 
games? The answer is, — All these things we may 
or may not do, as the case may be. Christianity is 
compatible with the doing or the not doing of any of 
them, but these things are not Christianity. 

The Christian is the soul that wills to love. But 
Love is an affection strong as well as tender. It 
may be well for the Christian to " sell all that he 
hath and give to the poor " ; or it may be well for 
him to trade with his ten talents and gain ten other 
talents. It depends. He may not allow his love to 
lead him to do mischief. Here, for example, may 
be a community of poor, living squalidly, lacking 
bread, crowded together and half sheltered, naked, 
sick, and cold. In their midst lives one of Christ's 
family who is rich. But suppose that community 
has no right to be there at all? Allow that it is 
collected, held together, by lust, greed, indolence, 
selfish thrif tlessness ? Grant that nothing less than 



THE NEW CREATION 195 

the hard stress of hunger and the discipline of cold 
will serve to bring it to a better life. What course 
of action will love point out to the Christian? I 
mean real love, the love that is solicitous, that wills 
for its object good rather than pleasure, the love 
that is strong enough to bear its own anguish 
of sympathy rather than find relief by opening its 
hand in largesse. And in what does this situation 
differ from that of the Son of Man, richly endowed 
with the power to heal and relieve, surrounded by a 
world full of sick, palsied, suffering, naked? Ought 
he to have expended his capital of divine power in 
indiscriminate healing? Love finds a way; but it 
must be the way which love illuminates. For Chris- 
tianity to follow the feeble and essentially selfish 
way of Tolstoi and his kind would be to transform 
it from a world force to a transient makeshift. It 
may well be that the peril most imminent to Chris- 
tianity to-day is to submit itself to the domination 
of a soft affection, like that of a soft and foolish 
mother for a spoiled and exacting child. The law 
of the Christian's being is indeed to love, even his 
enemies ; to bless even his persecutors ; but it must 
be with a good which works good and not harm to 
the enemy, a blessing which blesses rather than that 
works him evil. It must not be forgotten that the 
whole vocabulary of stern denunciation and judgment 
current in religious speech was coined by Jesus, and 
that it sprung from his unbounded love. His " woe 



196 CHRISTIANITY 

unto you " is as much a part of his message as his 
" blessed are you ". 

Nor may the Christian man or state put aside 
the sword when that is the weapon to which love 
points. The Puritans had a fine phrase for the 
character which they held in honor ; he was " faithful 
even unto slaying ". The angelic message was 
" peace to men of good will " ; not a soft and un- 
discriminating peace to men who deliberately do ill. 
Here again, the peril to Christianity may be not 
from those who too eagerly thrust the sword into 
its hand so much as from them who cry peace, peace, 
when there is no peace. There is evil in the world 
which is to be conquered and exorcised by gentle- 
ness ; but there is also evil which is to be driven 
down a steep place and choked. The Christian 
law is to love his neighbor as himself; neither 
less nor more. But is one at liberty to love him- 
self so that he may not discipline himself, with 
stripes if need be? If it be better for him to cut 
off his right hand or pluck out his right eye if it 
cause him to offend, shall love for himself hinder? 
And shall love forbid him to do so much for his 
neighbor? The widespread delusion which prevails 
in our time, the distress which many are suffering 
who would do the Master's will but cannot see the 
way, arises from a confusion of thought. The policy 
of the new Kingdom is for them that are within the 
Kingdom. There it can operate safely, and with 
incalculable potency. But it is not the law of " the 



THE NEW CREATION 197 

kingdoms of this earth ". If it be attempted to 
apply it prematurely, or in a region where its spirit 
vdiich is its dynamic is absent, it becomes the feeble 
and mischievous rule of doctrinaires. The New 
Order comes up, lives, multiplies like the old. That 
one made its appearance amid " the dragons welter- 
ing in the prime ". It struggled for existence ac- 
cording to the laws of its own nature ; but it did not 
essay to bring the dragons under its laAV. The king- 
doms of this earth are not yet the kingdoms of the 
Lord and of his Christ. His method was the suc- 
cessive winning of separate souls, now an Andrew, 
now a Peter, now a Philip, until he had discovered 
and won to himself a few men and women fitted to 
herald and inaugurate a higher and more perfect 
social life. 

It is no doubt true, as is often urged, that good 
men will not necessarily produce a good society. 
But it is not true of the kind of men which Christ 
begets. But they can only produce it in his way. 
The regime of the Kingdom is not to be promulgated 
prematurely, nor is it to be expected to function 
where the conditions are not present. His folk are 
counselled to be wise as serpents as well as harmless 
as doves. If they are wise they will not attempt 
to " restore the kingdom to Israel " at this or any 
other time. They will live their own immortal lives 
and quicken ever new lives into their own by contact 
of life with life. They are to be the salt of the 
earth. The use of salt is not for shining and arid 



198 CHRISTIANITY 

blocks to build temples and state houses withal. It 
does its work by disappearing in the lump to sweeten 
it. It is leaven, a single cell of which starts a fer- 
mentation where it touches. Its manner of life is 
not that of the mass within which it lives, but its 
own. When its function is accomplished it finds 
that it has done its work by dying. 

This is also the judgment of the great, wise 
world in the case. The Christian Church has never 
undertaken to administer charity without working 
mischief, or entered the arena of politics without 
doing evil. When the impatient minister who would 
hasten the Kingdom enters the region of political 
action, or social order, or economic arrangement, 
the world looks after him with a smile or a frown 
or a shrug or a malediction, as the case may be. Its 
true instinct tells it that this is not his sphere of 
action. Its hoarded experience moreover tells it 
that mischief will come of it. A Christian Social- 
ism, Christian Education, Christian Economics, are 
phrases which will not bear examination. If one 
should speak of " Christian " Chemistry, or " Chris- 
tian " Mathematics, the confusion involved would 
be obvious, but it exists in the other phrases none the 
less. Christian men have indeed to do with the activ- 
ities of life, and must needs go into every region of 
it. But they do not go for the purpose of overturn- 
ing the laws which obtain in those regions. Wherever 
they go they meet beings of their own order, and 
they transform others into their own likeness by] 



THE NEW CREATION 199 

vital conduct. There is a freemasonry of the spirit 
which does not exhibit the work of its lodge in the 
market-place or the legislature. When his friends 
would have " taken Jesus by force and compelled 
him to be a king " he departed and hid himself. He 
continues to do so. 

The first and typical Christian is Christ. If one 
can get free from misconception he will see the mar- 
vellous simplicity of that life. He set out neither 
to seek a cross for himself nor to readjust the world's 
confusion. He went not a single step out of his path 
to find a pang of body or soul. Such hurts as might 
be avoided without missing his purpose were avoided. 
He met the cross because it stood in his path. He 
neither sought nor shunned it. Nor did he meddle 
in any way with institutions or collective terms of 
evil. Intemperance, cruelty, slavery, injustice, in- 
fanticide, divorce, were all around him. They flour- 
ish as vigorously yet in heathenesse. Within Chris- 
tendom he and his kind have wonderfully reduced 
them, and expect to eradicate them. But what of 
success has been achieved has been by his method. 
The organizers of reforms and secretaries of socie- 
ties have their work to do, and their work is most 
efficient where the personnel is most Christian, but 
after all it remains true that the " kingdom of 
heaven cometh not with observation ". The regener- 
ating force in human society has been and is that 
innumerable company of unknown men and women 
who have been transformed in the image and likeness 



200 CHRISTIANITY 

of Christ, who do not cry nor lift up their voices 
in the street, but quicken the world by simply liv- 
ing their new life. Outwardly they look and act 
much as other men; but essentially they are new 
creatures. , 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



" The idea of One Holy Catholic Church was not 
early developed in the consciousness of Christendom. 
In the East this article of the Church does not occur in 
the creed of Ignatius, a.d. 107:, nor in that of Origen in 
the middle of the third century, nor in the creed of 
Lucian of Antioch at the beginning of the fourth cen- 
tury. It first appears in the private creed of Arius, 328. 
The Nicene creed has no article of the Church, but in 
the Nicene-Constantinopolitan form it appears in its 
fulness, ' One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.' 
This point was reached toward the close of four hundred 
years of Christian thought ". — Wood, " Survivals in 
Christianity ". 



XIII 
THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

It is plain that Jesus had in mind a church; it 
is equally plain that the thing which we call the 
Church is not the thing he had in mind. The diffi- 
culty which one confronts at the outset is to find 
the thing at all. There is no objective reality to 
which the title " Christian Church " can be applied. 
There are churches a plenty ; but there is no Church. 
If any one fancy there is, let him ask himself, where 
is it ? Let him point to it, define it, locate it, delimit 
it. If he urge that the hundreds of organizations 
called churches are actually the component parts of 
some great, all-embracing Kingdom, we can only say 
that he has not stopped to examine the content of 
his thought. What he has in mind is the picture 
of an empire which includes within it separate and 
partially independent states. That conception is a 
perfectly coherent and legitimate one. It is possible 
for an empire to be thus constituted ; but only on the 
condition that the constitutive states act harmoni- 
ously toward a common end, and that the empire 
have a conscious will and purpose of its own. But 
this is precisely what the churches do not do. They 

203 



204 CHRISTIANITY 

do not act together harmoniously ; they confront and 
oppose each other; they do not work toward a com- 
mon end, for they do not conceive the purpose the 
same way; and the universal Church thus imagined 
has neither a conscious will and purpose of its own 
nor any organ by which to express it. " The One 
Holy Catholic Church " is a phrase to which no 
objective reality corresponds. 

In the political sphere we observe a steady move- 
ment toward unification, and this movement has been 
visible for a long time. There are not one-half as 
many separate governments in the world to-day as 
there were even a century ago. So far as one can 
see there is much more immediate prospect of a Uni- 
versal State than there is of a Universal Church. 
It is a startling fact that the most potent divisive 
force at work in Christendom is the churches. All 
other barriers are easier to overcome, all other 
schisms easier to heal. This is all the more amaz- 
ing when we reflect that the dying prayer of its 
Founder was " that they all may be one ". The 
actual facts are indeed so monstrous that Christians 
habitually try to disguise them. They fondly 
imagine an ideal Church at some undefined date or 
place in the past, whose unity has been broken, but 
which we may hope to see restored ; or that the rival- 
ries are not real rivalries but emulations ; or that 
the Church is essentially an invisible, transcendental 
thing, not meant to show concretely on earth. But 
these are only fond imaginings. However they may 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 205 

satisfy those who nurse them, the great open-eyed 
world knows better. 

Let us examine the situation as it actually is. 
There is no Christian Church, that is, there is no 
such world-organization with a conscious mind and 
will, and organs to give them expression, and there 
never has been. Instead, we find the ecclesiastical 
world divided into three great sections, with in- 
numerable subdivisions. Each of these acts not only 
apart from the others, but acts habitually with a 
view to thwart, restrain, and overthrow the others. 
More important still, each has a separate spirit, 
a different organizing principle The Oriental 
churches are organized around the principle of 
Dogma. The object which they place above all 
others is to hand down through the ages certain 
formularies which they conceive to express finally 
the truth concerning Christ. To this end all else 
is subordinated. They call themselves the " Ortho- 
dox " Church. The outcome of this spirit has been 
what might have been expected, intellectual stagna- 
tion and moral impotence. The Eastern Church sits 
to-day in its tawdry Basilica an embalmed corpse, 
robed in stiffly embroidered vestments, with a creed 
in its dead hand, while its people bow before it 
with the forehead, and hear from its lips no voice 
which reaches their souls. Its people are devout, 
ignorant, superstitious ; its rulers are orthodox, 
cruel, punctilious of ecclesiastical form, and lacking 
in truth and ruth. A keen observer who has had 



206 CHRISTIANITY 

great opportunity to know has said that " the Rus- 
sian Empire is really not an empire at all; it is a 
church, and its qualities are those which the Church 
has produced." This Church has had a longer con- 
tinuous life than any other, and so far as one can 
see, it has in the main missed the spirit and purpose 
of the Master. In any case it stands remote from 
the rest of the Christian world, understanding it 
little, and little affected by it. 

The second in order, both historically and geo- 
graphically, is the Church of Rome. As the Russian 
Empire is, strictly speaking, not an empire but a 
church, so this, to be accurate, is not a church but 
an empire. Its organizing principle is Dominion. 
Its cardinal claim is Authority; its cardinal virtue 
is Obedience. Its claim is in no way disguised or miti- 
gated. It asserts itself to be the true and only 
Church of Christ on earth. Its Pope is God's vice- 
gerent, and is infallible. Within it there is eternal 
safety; outside it there is no safety. Because Christ 
has ordained it so, it has authority over every region 
of human life and action, its only limit being its 
own judgment not to enter upon any given area. 
If it does not regulate political or domestic arrange- 
ments, it is only because it decides in its own wisdom 
not to do so, and not because it is without right 
to do so. Its one aim is domination. To this it 
adjusts all its power and machinery. Its informa- 
tion is drawn from every quarter of the world. Its 
ministers and officials are loose-footed janizaries. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 207 

who may not take root anywhere in family life, or 
form human affections which may weaken or hamper 
their absolute devotion to the organization .which 
they serve. Its characteristic title is " Catholic " ; 
it claims authority over all. It is the old Roman 
Imperium baptized. It believes that in this fashion 
it represents Christ's will, and best carries out his 
intention. Is it right in its claim .^^ Is it likely to 
succeed .P 

The first of these inquiries I need hardly stay to 
answer. But the second is one about which well 
informed men are slow to form an opinion. Per- 
sonally I do not believe that any one is warranted 
in either hoping or fearing that the Roman idea 
of the Church will prevail. It has within it elements 
of great potency, as all must see, but has within it 
also the seeds of its own necessary decay. Looking 
over its history during the centuries, one is struck 
by the fact that at the very times and places where 
its success has been most complete its overthrow has 
been most imminent. It ought to be borne in mind 
that this idea of universal dominion was not always 
held by the Roman Church. It took possession of 
the organization slowly, but in the end controlled 
it entirely. Nowhere else in history, probably, has 
equal patience and sagacity been displayed in work- 
ing toward the realization of an ideal, and nowhere 
else more complete and reiterated failure. From the 
sixth century onward for nearly a thousand years 
this organization dreamed, planned, prayed, and 



S08 CHRISTIANITY 

fought for dominion over Western Europe. Finally 
it gained its end. At the opening of the sixteenth 
century there was none to gainsay its will. King 
and artisan, scholar and peasant alike were docile 
subjects of this ecclesiastical empire. But its suc- 
cess was its undoing. Within a century it lost the 
British Islands, Scandinavia, the most of Germany, 
with local insurrections throughout its whole domain. 
Then, with the same infinite patience and skill, it 
set about the task of reconstruction. Once again 
it succeeded within a more restricted area in Europe, 
but replaced the lost territory with a wider empire 
in Mexico and South America. Three centuries 
more have gone by, and during them it has lost 
its rule in Mexico, the South and Central American 
states, in France, Italy, and Portugal, and with 
Spain in insurrection. In all these cases, wherever 
the people have had opportunity to express their 
will by vote, they have turned against the Church, 
refused to do her will, restrained her pretensions, 
secularized her accumulated wealth, expelled her 
agents, in a word, repudiated her principle of do- 
minion. These things have happened too often and 
too uniformly to be attributed to accident or to the 
unruly wills and passions of men or times. They 
can well be accounted for as the operation of a law 
which may always be counted upon to show itself 
when the time is full. Will the same cycle be run 
in these United States, where the immediate destiny 
of the world is lodged.'' One must needs fear it or 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 209 

hope it, according to his wish. Here is the same 
ancient claim of dominion, — nothing abated, nothing 
disguised. Here is the same patience, skill, and de- 
votion in upbuilding. Here is the same semblance 
of success. Will there be the same revolt and over- 
throw? And when? 

The third segment of the ecclesiastical circle is 
that ill-defined aggregation which we call Protestant- 
ism. The spirit and temper which differentiates it 
has been in the world always ; but in so far as it is 
organized it dates from the revolt against the Roman 
claim to domination in the sixteenth century. With 
it we are more immediately concerned. How nearly 
does it present Christ's ideal of a Church? What 
is its outlook? When one studies its history he is 
impressed by the fact that as an ecclesiastical force 
it has lost much of its initial energy. It reminds 
one of the course of a mighty shell fired by an 
enormous charge. While it held together its mo- 
mentum was terrific, but as it broke into fragments 
each fragment possessed less energy. When these 
in succession subdivided its potential energy became 
still feebler. The explosive power which impelled 
it originally was the sense of individual libertj^, — 
liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and speech, 
liberty of action. When these are restrained or re- 
pressed, they gather an ever increasing fulminating 
energy. But when they are set free, maybe with 
noise and commotion, they do not always quite know 
what to do with themselves. This is the condition 



210 CHRISTIANITY 

of the Protestant churches. They are free, and they 
do not know what next. Liberty is a dangerous 
spirit to raise. The only power to control it is 
Truth. But here they hesitate and fumble. A cen- 
tury ago each one had a Confession or a System 
of truth which satisfied it. It had a message wliich, 
whether true or faulty, it could deliver when chal- 
lenged. But now the very spirit of intellectual free- 
dom which they invoked has examined these doctrinal 
structures, and in the name of Truth has rejected 
them. The result has been to produce a hesitation 
and sense of uncertainty which bodes ill for Protest- 
antism. It lacks a clear and definite message to 
heathen and Christian alike. Once it could go to 
the heathen with a heart full of pity for a man 
who, it believed, would be consigned to eternal tor- 
ment in hell if the missionary failed to reach him 
in time to save. It does not believe that now; but 
it has not found clearly what motive will take its 
place and do its work. It would be difficult to find 
a place where greater disingenuousness prevails than 
here. Congregations of Christian people are ex- 
horted to labor and give " to carry the Gospel to 
them that are perishing ". With their gifts the 
missionary machinery of the denomination plants new 
churches in communities where the Gospel has been 
proclaimed for years, and where are too many 
churches already. The motive which is urged is 
not really the motive which controls. The desire 
is not really to " carry the Gospel ", it is to extend 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 211 

and aggrandize the ecclesiastical organization. If 
any Church actually believes that outside itself sal- 
vation is not to be found, this appeal is morally 
worthy, whatever may be said of its reasonableness. 
But if it does not believe that one shrinks from 
giving its " missionary " activity a name. 

It at least looks as though organized Protestantism 
were a spent force. It is uncertain and hesitating 
in its message ; its rivalries and consequent wasteful- 
ness render it impotent ; it has lost the controlling 
position it once held in colleges and universities ; the 
laboring classes have largely drifted beyond the 
sound of its voice; the middle classes are less and 
less attending its services ; the great gifts of money 
which it once received are now being turned in other 
directions. Its Revival machinery has to a large 
extent been abandoned. General Booth declares that 
the Salvation Army as well as other companies 
which set out with the single aim " to save souls ", 
tend irresistibly to become instruments for the dis- 
tribution of secular charity. An ever increasing 
number who have been counted within the churches 
are dropping away. It is not because they have 
been seduced from their old allegiance by a rival, 
or have become hostile, it is simply because they do 
not find anything there which satisfies their religious 
need. In a word, it is not powerful enough as an 
organization, as Rome is, to be reckoned with in 
political life. It is too incoherent to speak or act 
efficiently in the social sphere. It does not, as it 



SI 2 CHRISTIANITY 

once did, command the enthusiastic service of the 
religious individual. 

From all these things, which are commonplace 
facts, within the ken of all observant men, it would 
seem that there is something fundamentally faulty 
in all the attempts which have been made to realize 
concretely Christ's ideal of a Church. Where the 
exhibition of Doctrine is the controlling motive, it 
ends in Oriental stagnation. Where Dominion is its 
aim, it runs round within the closed circle of Rome, 
through growth, power, tyranny, to revolt, and 
around again. Where Individual Liberty is the goal, 
it issues in confusion and weakness. Neither Ortho- 
doxy, nor Catholicity, nor Liberty, nor any nice 
balance and combination of them, can be the notes 
or tests of the Society which Jesus contemplated. 

Against this whole view two objections are likely 
to be opposed. In the first place, it will be said, 
the churches are actually strong and vigorous, and 
are striving mightily to conquer the world for 
Christ. Their statistics of growth can always be 
marshalled in such a way as to spell success. Never- 
theless, their general course through a long period 
of time has been as I have set forth. In calculating 
the line of movement of any body one can only study 
that portion of its orbit which has been under 
observation. From that the equation of its curve 
is calculated, and its destination predicted. 

The second objection is, that it is inconceivable 
that the Divine Founder of the New Kingdom should 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 213 

have permitted its line of movement to be thus de- 
flected to barren issues. Could he have allowed so 
long time to be wasted while his people made their 
mistakes and discovered them? We can only reply 
by pointing to what is God's actual way of doing 
things. He permitted nature to run out a myriad 
of aimless lines before she discovered the one which 
culminated in Man. How many more aeons were 
seemingly wasted before the New Man was reached.'' 
One thing we ma}^ be sure of, in the New Kingdom 
as well as in the old, the members thereof will be 
allowed to find out and retrace their missteps, let 
the time be long or short. 

For many ages the minds of Christians have 
turned backward with a sort of helpless yearning 
toward the " primitive Church ". It has been felt 
that it possessed a secret of power which has in some 
way fallen out of sight. Probably no equally brief 
period of time has ever been studied so exhaustively 
as has the century which followed the disappearance 
of Jesus. During that time his Society spread with 
such amazing rapidity, exhibited such a unique life, 
was so sure of itself, moved toward its purpose with 
such inexplicable courage, arrested and held the 
attention of the encompassing world in such a way 
as to compel the conviction that it knew something 
which we do not know and wielded some power which 
the Church to-day does not possess. But the at- 
tempt to recover the lost secret has not been satis- 
factory, ^lay it be possible that wo have looked 



214 CHRISTIANITY 

for the wrong thing? Theologians have scrutinized 
the records of the Early Church to find out what 
was its creed. Ecclesiastics have interrogated it 
to find out its form of organization, — whether it was 
Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Congregational, whether 
it recognized this official or that, and which was 
superior and which subordinate. Liturgists have 
studied to ascertain whether its rites were performed 
in this way or that way. Antiquarians have asked 
it curious questions about its manners and customs. 
To all these questionings it vouchsafes but a meagre 
answer. And, what is of more consequence, it an- 
swers in a tone which shows that it deemed all these 
things of small moment. It refuses to say what its 
doctrine was, or what its policy. Any, or all, or 
none, of the interpretations put upon it may be 
correct. But its secret was in none of these things. 
There are two conceptions of a church. One is 
that it is an Organization, in form analogous to a 
political State, but in spirit and purpose religious. 
It is a State which includes in it all sorts of citizens, 
a few who are intelligently loyal and devoted, and 
many who accept its citizenship and share its benefits 
and protection passively, without thought, by force 
of habit. It includes good citizens and bad. Its 
terms of naturalization are intentionally adjusted to 
admit and to include all save those who have shown 
themselves dangerous to the body politic. Most of 
its members are such by the accident of birth within 
its frontiers. It is simply human society ordered 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 215 

in one way for religious life, as it is ordered in a 
different way for secular life. According to this 
view, the ideal Church in any country would be one 
which is exactly conterminous with the State, and of 
which every inhabitant is ex-ofpcio a member. In 
its perfect form the Christian Church and the Chris- 
tian State would be identical. The distinction be- 
tween sacred and secular would disappear. This is 
in fact the conception of the Church which holds 
the field. It is true that its ideal is not realized, 
the Church is broken and divided, but each separate 
portion acts after the manner of a state; fixes the 
terms of citizenship ; counts all born within it as 
members ; admits, rejects, expels, as it judges proper. 
It makes or unmakes citizens according to its own 
rules. But the goal toward which all these petty 
religious states look is a time when they shall have 
negotiated terms of consolidation, and shall be fused 
together in one great Christian Church which will 
include all the people. Was this the consummation 
which Jesus had in mind when he projected his 
Church? Would such a religious commonwealth be 
the Church of Christ? 

There is another conception which is drawn from 
quite a different sphere of human life and action. 
According to it the Church is not a state but a 
family. It is constituted of individuals whose bond 
of union is altogether unlike that which binds together 
citizens in a commonwealth. Its members are related 
by blood, bound together by a common kinship, 



S16 CHRISTIANITY 

cemented by an affection. This affection springs 
from their antecedent kinship. This Family is in 
the world, but not of it. It increases and multiplies 
by its own methods. As such, it has no concern 
with the secular life in the midst of which it hves. 
It has its own ideals, its own activities, and finds its 
own satisfactions. It is not an organization, but 
an organism ; not an aggregation, but a brotherhood. 

Now, it is commonly assumed that these two con- 
ceptions of the Church can live and act at the same 
time; that it can be at once a state and a family; 
that it can expand according to the ways of a state, 
and at the same time grow according to the ways 
of a biological kingdom. This cannot be. A thing 
cannot at the same time grow like a plant and be 
built like a house. The two modes of being are 
incompatible. To merely recognize this confusion 
of thought would go far toward setting the Church 
in the way to correct its practical confusions. 

The first Christians thought little about a church, 
one way or the other. They thought of themselves 
as a family, each member of which felt within him- 
self the thrill of a new life. They were " alive in 
Christ " ; they had been " born again " ; made " new 
creatures " ; " old things had passed away and all 
things had become new " for them. They were 
bound together in this new spiritual kinship. It 
constituted a relationship closer than friendship or 
even common blood. So completely did it take pos- 
session of them that they had all things in common; 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH S17 

neither did any count anything his own. They sold 
all their possessions and brought the proceeds to the 
Apostles' feet for distribution among " the breth- 
ren ". Their motive had nothing in common with 
that which produces " Socialism ". Nor was it any- 
thing like " love of mankind ", or " realization of a 
common humanity ". They took no account of man- 
kind as such. As a fact they were denounced by 
their contemporaries as haters of mankind. When 
they spoke of " the brethren ", " the faithful ", " the 
saints ", they meant those individuals, many or few, 
who shared with them the new life. When they 
preached their message was " the resurrection and 
the new life ". They imparted this life by personal 
contact. When the divine spark was kindled in 
any one he was baptized and numbered with the 
disciples. He was baptized because, as St. Peter 
said of Cornelius and his friends, " they have re- 
ceived the Holy Spirit even as we ". There was no 
doctrinal test at all, in our sense of the word. There 
was no moral test save the evidence of the new life. 
Nor by that did they mean any superior morality, 
but only the new spirit, which they confidently ex- 
pected to produce Christlike conduct. They met 
together in affectionate family groups for the break- 
ing of bread. Such rites as they had were simple 
and natural. Such officials as they had were not 
sharply distinguished from the rest of the brethren. 
Their aim was to spread a new kind of life, not 
to organize and extend an institution. Their im- 



218 CHRISTIANITY 

mediate success was the most wonderful thing in 
human history. Under the same conditions the mis- 
sionary machinery and the missionary motive of 
to-day would have been as impotent as the attempt 
to create a man by steam power. 

This " Brotherhood of the New Life " in that form 
passed out of sight with the end of the first century, 
like a western river disappears in the sand. For 
nearly two centuries thereafter almost nothing is 
known concerning it. When it emerges again in the 
light of history, its Gospel had become " Christi- 
anity ". The upper room where the family group 
had broken bread together had been expanded into 
the gorgeous Basilica; the elder had become the 
Pontiff; the simple Communion meal had become a 
mysterious sacramental Function; instead of little 
companies bound together in affection we find great 
congregations, strangers to one another; instead of 
" the brethren " it now embraces the population of 
the empire, from the Emperor down; instead of a 
band of brothers sharing their possessions with each 
other we find a Church with imperial endowments. 
It has a hierarchy, liturgies, canons, creeds, disci- 
plines. In a word, the society which passed out of 
sight a spiritual brotherhood reappears a religious 
empire. Was this a development or transforma- 
tion? 

For a brief period the Ecclesiastical State pre- 
served a political unity, identified with the unity of 
the empire. But presently the empire fell to 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 219 

pieces, and the Church broke up with it. From that 
time to this the pohtical conception of the Church 
continued ; notwithstanding there has been no time — 
not even a single day — when one could point to any 
organization and say, this, or this, is the Church. 
Now, at the beginning of this twentieth century since 
Christ, multitudes of good men are profoundly dis- 
satisfied with the situation. Their quarrel is not 
with this church or that one, with this dogma or 
that one ; they hold aloof from them all. They hold 
Christ in unfeigned reverence. They are not sure 
whether or not they accept the definitions of him set 
forth in the formularies. They do not feel sure 
that they could define him any better, but they are 
sure they would define less. They possess the same 
spirit which was in him, some of them to a pre- 
eminent degree. But they have no use for a church. 
In Catholic countries they firmly refuse to yield it 
the personal submission which it demands. There 
are indications, moreover, that the attitude of pas- 
sive aloofness which they have maintained for a long 
time is changing into active impatience and hostility. 
In Protestant communities they refuse to acknowl- 
edge the divine sanction of any church. To speak 
frankly, the things about which they see the churches 
busying themselves appear to them to be paltry and 
unreal. Their rites seem archaic arid conventional, 
their teaching either unintelligible or disingenuous. 
They gauge accurately the real influence of the 
churches in practical affairs, and they hold the 



S20 CHRISTIANITY 

opinion that the controlling motive of each one is 
to exploit society in its own interest. This is the 
class with which the churches must reckon. It is 
one which has never before been confronted on a 
large scale. Now it is increasing with enormous 
rapidity. One may say that its presence is the 
characteristic feature of the religious situation. 
Among it is a very large proportion of the leaders 
in every region of life, managers of affairs, admin- 
istrators of charities, educators, governors of states, 
college professors, editors of newspapers, judges, 
legislators, farmers, teachers, mechanics. The rate 
of increase of this class is many times greater than 
the churches' increase. 

The primitive conception of the Church has never 
perished. It has been oversloughed by the political 
imagery employed, but it has always persisted. 
Christians still speak of each other as " brethren ", 
even in circumstances where the epithet is less than 
appropriate. They still have a definition of the real 
Church which they never apply to any actual one, 
the " Blessed Company of all Faithful People ". 
The language which they spontaneously use at the 
times of deepest devotion always echoes the original 
thought. At Baptism the terms used to indicate 
the meaning of the transaction are biological terms: 
" regenerated ", " grafted into the body of Christ's 
Church ". They are terms which would be mean- 
ingless in any political sense. They throw back to 
a time when the Church thought in those terms. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH S21 

They speak of " being received as God's Child by 
adoption ", " dying unto sin ", " living unto right- 
eousness ", and such like. In the other Sacrament 
the same ideas lie at bottom. Its terms and symbols 
are vital, not political ones. And for this reason, 
that, as things are, at that Table and there only the 
real Church is encountered. It speaks its own 
mother-tongue because there are no strangers pres- 
ent. Was it wise for it ever to attempt to speak 
a universal language? 

Here, then, would seem to be the key to the whole 
perplexing situation. The Church of Jesus Christ 
began as a new Family in the world. It was meant 
to grow according to its own laws of reproduction. 
For a time it did so. Eventually, even if slowly, it 
would have absorbed and assimilated all from among 
men who are ready to " be bom again ". But the 
process was slow, costly, painful. When the pain 
was at the heaviest the Emperor of the world offered 
it " all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of 
them ". The wearied Church accepted. Instead of 
transforming the world, the world transformed it. 
Thus did " the fatal gift of Constantine " seduce and 
mislead the Bride of Christ. 

But if this be true in any real sense, what is there 
for the Church to do? Can she retrace her stumbling 
steps back to the fourth century, find the place where 
the path branched, and start anew along the other 
road? We may be quite sure she will not do this 
except as a last resort. The dream of being a world 



S22 CHRISTIANITY 

power has been too long entertained for that. The 
habit of reckoning success by numbers has become 
a second nature. So long as by any means the 
figures may be made to show increase of numbers 
the habit will continue. But there are indications 
from every quarter that she will be compelled to 
retrace her steps and resume her old ideal. 

Few realize how profound is the revolution which 
has occurred during late times in the relation be- 
tween the Church and organized society. In Con- 
stantine's time Christianity was made the official re- 
ligion of the State. From that time onward, for 
fifteen hundred years, the State built churches, main- 
tained them, constrained the people to attend them. 
This came to be everywhere regarded as the natural 
as well as the divine order of things. The force 
of statutes, the resources of taxation, the power of 
the common law, could all be appealed to in the 
interest of the Church. Tliis condition remained 
until the United States, the first government in the 
world to do so, decreed in her constitution that " no 
law should be made concerning religion ". The far- 
reaching consequences of that provision were proba- 
bly not dreamed of by any man then living. It 
started that movement now almost complete, to take 
from the Church's hand the staff upon which she 
has leaned throughout almost the whole of her jour- 
ney. When the Church asked for liberty, for " the 
separation of Church and State ", she little realized 
what effect it would have upon her own fortunes. 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH S23 

That effect has been long in showing itself. Long 
after the State withdrew its support, society from 
use and wont continued to do through pressure of 
custom and public opinion that which law had for- 
merly compelled. We have now about reached the 
point where public opinion follows the constitution. 
We are in spite of ourselves being pushed, or led, 
back to the position of the primitive Church. That 
asked nothing of the powers of this world except 
to be let alone. It was a voluntary association of 
the men of the new life, living and acting in the 
midst of a society which took no account of it or its 
rules, except as they were won, one at a time, to 
submit themselves to the new Way. But when the 
State offered its powerful aid they gratefully fell 
into its arms. Now the Emperor has abandoned the 
Church which he seduced. 

In proportion as the churches realize and accept 
the situation will they find the path clear, though 
no doubt painful. But if the path is to be found 
it must be by those who have become free from the 
dogmatic and imperial spirit of Constantine's age. 
Indeed it is most unlikely that the churches, acting 
officially, will ever escape from the evil case into 
which they are rapidly falling. So far as one can see, 
the Roman Church has so completely identified her- 
self with the idea of dominion that to abandon it 
would be suicide. It may even be probable that 
for a time her gain may be great by reason of the 
migration to her of those who have felt after the 



224 CHRISTIANITY 

same ideal in Protestantism without finding satis- 
faction. But even so, the obstacles in the way of 
her realizing her dream are multiplying as time goes 
on. Her ultimate failure is inevitable from the na- 
ture of things. For the same reason the Anglican 
churches which affect to maintain a nice balance 
between two incompatible conceptions of what the 
Church is, must dwindle by the dropping away of 
those who find no satisfaction in either of them. So 
also, the separate Protestant churches appear to be 
each one so compactly organized around its particu- 
lar confession and so bound to its own Church by 
sentiment that no formal action is likely to be taken. 
But is it still too much to expect that the disjecta 
memhra of the Christian fraternity may draw to- 
gether and become a Church such as Jesus had in 
mind? Such a Church, pretending to be nothing 
but what it is, with the sad experience of the cen- 
turies to enlighten it, would find Church Unity a 
thing already achieved. Its creed, discipline, and 
ministry would arrange themselves, for they would 
be, as they were originally, the natural and spon- 
taneous expression of its life. No doubt they would 
be much the same as they have always been, but 
they would occupy a different and far less conspicu- 
ous place than is now accorded them. Its creed 
would, maybe, be less precise, but more alive; its 
ministry less prominent and more serviceable; its 
discipline not that of rules and canons, but that in- 



THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 225 

exorable law by which living things choose and re- 
ject among the things they touch. 

Such a Church would be undisturbed by the exodus 
now going on. It would see it for what it actually 
is, namely the automatic correction of a census main- 
tained long upon a false basis. It would not be 
disturbed by the withdrawal of that great multitude 
who have gone out from it because they were really 
not of it. For such a Church many souls are wait- 
ing. Good men, like those I have instanced above, 
do not stand aloof from the Church as it is now 
because it is too religious, but because it is not 
religious enough. They would greet with sober ardor 
a Church which offered them a share in the new and 
abiding life in Christ, and which took no thought for 
itself at all. For Jesus' dictum is as true for a 
Church as for a man, " whoso humbleth himself shall 
be exalted, and he that exalteth himself shall be 
abased ". 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 



" Later on, — My creed has melted away, but I be- 
lieve in good, in the moral order, and in salvation; reli- 
gion for me is to live and die in God, in complete aban- 
donment to the holy will which is at the root of nature 
and destiny. I believe in the Gospel, the Good News — 
that is to say, faith in the love of a pardoning Father ". 
— Amiel, Journal. 



XIV 
THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 

A LARGE portion, and by no means the worst, of 
the world to-day is dissatisfied with its religion. It 
is not less but more anxious to find some outlet for 
its devotion, some guide for its life, some answer to 
its obstinate questionings, than at any previous 
time. Parents stand hesitatingly before their chil- 
dren, and do not know what they ought to teach 
them. They are more and more reluctant to confide 
them to the Sunday school, for there, they believe, 
they will be taught a host of things which are not 
true, and they dread the time when the children 
shall discover, as they themselves have, that they 
are not true. Tens of thousands of men and women 
who used to attend church habitually no longer da 
so. Every Christian minister sees and deplores this 
falling away. No statistics or census reports will 
disguise the fact. Church statistics are worth less 
than nothing. One, for example, reports simply 
" Catholic Population ", that is, the number who, 
in its judgment, ought to belong to it. Others re- 
port by name and number the additions, and only 
guess at the lapses and losses. It is probably speak- 
ing within bounds to say that not one parish in ten 

229 



230 CHRISTIANITY 

could find and locate one-half the number of mem- 
bers it reports. Even with this method of enumera- 
tion one of the most vigorous of churches, the Prot- 
estant Episcopal, reports ^ for 1910 a net gain of 
only two per cent, in members ; an increase of 51 
in Confirmations for a communicant list of 800,000; 
an actual decrease in Baptisms and Marriages. No 
doubt other churches would make a similar show- 
ing. 

It would be an error to refer this falling away to 
increasing luxury, or dissipation, or satisfaction 
with secular life. In the first place, the loss is 
greater among the working classes than among the 
well to do. Beside that, the religious interest of 
the masses is shown by the eager way in which the}^ 
snatch at any other answer offered to the riddle of 
life. When Professor HaeckePs " Riddle of the Uni- 
verse " appeared a few years ago, two hundred thou- 
sand copies were sold in a single year. It and books 
like it, are welcomed and read, not because they 
fortify unbelievers in their denials, but because they 
provide some answer, poor, thin, and disheartening 
as it is, to the demands which Christianity as pre- 
sented does not satisfy. What, then, is it which 
Christianity, when stripped of all extraneous and 
superfluous matter, has to say to the soul which 
seeks to know.? The substance of the reply may be 
stated somewhat as follows: 

The controlling principle of Jesus' teaching and 

^ Whittaker's Almanac. 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 231 

living is that the essential quality of the being whom 
he calls " Father " is love. He presents him, not as 
a great king conducting the complex affairs of a 
great empire, nor as a creator constructing and 
regulating the complicated movement of the uni- 
verse, but rather as some venerable and benignant 
Oriental sheik. He has children and descendants 
beyond count, and in their veins his own blood flows. 
But as they have multiplied they have moved away 
from and become unmindful of their father and of 
their kinship with each other. This fact weighs, an 
eternal burden, on the patriarch's heart. They are 
indifferent to him, and they quarrel with one an- 
other. No machinery, no law or threat of penalty 
can reach the situation. The one thing, and the 
only thing which can bring harmony out of the con- 
fusion of existence is the restoration of the family 
affection. 

But it is plain that this cannot be brought about 
by compulsion. The verb to love has no imperative 
mood. God can no more compel a man to love him 
than can a man compel the affection of his wife or 
neighbor. Nor are arguments of any more avail. 
Love laughs at reasons. This is why both Theology 
and Ethics are impotent. Theology addresses itself 
to the intelligence, and Ethics to the conscience, 
whereas it is the affections which are primarily con- 
cerned. " My son, give me thine heart " is the bur- 
den of God's speech. The very most that Theology 
as a science can do is to make it appear probable 



S32 CHRISTIANITY 

that the nature and action of God in the universe is 
thus and so. But the crucial point at which it sig- 
nally breaks down is in the attempt to convince that 
the God of thought has a heart. A candid survey of 
the actual facts of life leaves one in doubt as to 
whether the world is controlled by a Power who 
wishes well, or wishes ill, or is utterly indifferent to 
the fortunes of men. Looking at the course of his- 
tory in the large it is possible, no doubt, to discern 
in its movement " a power, not ourselves, wliich 
makes for righteousness ". It is possible, but it is 
not inevitable. For, while it is true that a steady 
progress in goodness and gentleness can be seen 
from time to time in this or that people, or race, 
or epoch, still, even these appear to be arrested at 
last by the stronger force of age and decline. 

Even were it possible to establish the fact that 
the race is being steadily led forward in goodness, 
there is nothing to show that the Power which leads 
it has either hate or ruth for the individual. The 
old ditty has in it the concentrated experience of the 
ages,— 

"As I walked by myself, I talked to myself, 
And thus myself did say to me; 

* Look to thyself, and take care of thyself. 
For nobody cares for thee '. 

" Then I turned to myself, and I answered myself 
In the selfsame reverie; 

* Look to thyself, or look not to thyself, 
The selfsame thing will be ' ". 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 253 

The most that any Ethical system can do, on the 
other hand, is to express an opinion, more or less 
weighty, that men ought to act toward each other 
thus and so. It may well be doubted whether men 
have ever been appreciably influenced by any scien- 
tific presentation of Morals. From Confucius and 
Aristotle down to Bernard Shaw, the moralist has 
been a speculator in abstractions. His achievement 
is only to take a certain number of " oughts " and 
" ought nots " already present in human society, ar- 
range them in the symmetrical way which he fancies, 
expound their relationships, and — with scant success 
— try to trace their origin, and get them put in prac- 
tise. There is no motive power in ethics, whether as 
a judgment formed by the individual, or as a com- 
pulsion imposed from without. 

Not that Theology and Ethics are useless. The 
intelligence which craves knowledge, even of the un- 
knowable, both will and ought to seek its satisfac- 
tions. The moral conduct of men needs regulation 
from day to day, and society must control it, with 
what knowledge it can gather from any quarter. But 
neither of these have to do, except indirectly, with 
Christ's scheme of things. They do not function in 
that area of life in which he moves. 

It is commonly assumed that the disturbing ele- 
ment in life is that thing which we call Sin. But 
this is not Christ's view. It is most significant that 
while he lived he off'ended the moralist and the con- 
ventionally religious by what they thought to be 



2S4 CHRISTIANITY 

the laxity of his moral judgments. Publicans and 
sinners were his daily companions. The woman sur- 
prised in the very act of the capital crime against 
social morals was rescued by him from her accusers, 
and dismissed with a kindly warning. The leman of 
Simon the Pharisee received from him no harsher 
judgment than " she sinned much because she loved 
much ". On the other hand. Dives, whom he con- 
signed to the torments of hell, had not actively sinned 
at all. The Scribes and Pharisees whom he de- 
nounced unsparingly were probably men of exem- 
plary life. 

His contention from first to last is that the evil 
in life is not sin but Selfishness. It would probably 
be more true to say that he reached down to the 
fundamental truth that all sin is at bottom selfish- 
ness. There is really no other sin. All offences are, 
when analyzed, seen to be but allotropic forms of 
this one. Lust, for example, is but the desire to 
possess, without regard to the good of the thing 
possessed. Hate is but the cold determination to 
rid oneself of the person whose existence disturbs 
his sense of well being. Its final expression is mur- 
der, for, as Shylock says, " hateth any man the thing 
he would not kill".? Theft is selfishness pure and 
simple. So of all other immoralities whatsoever, they 
are but expressions of love of self. Christianity, on 
the other hand, is Altruism. But it is altniism made 
dynamic. The amazing thing is that it should have 
ever been presented as self-seeking raised to its 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 235 

highest power, and given the sanction of religious 
obligation. For what else is the exhortation to the 
individual to " seek salvation ", to " save his soul "? 
And what other motive impels the monk and the re- 
cluse to withdraw from the world of affections in the 
hope of finding his own highest good? Jesus' dictum 
— ^which is not a paradox — is " he that saveth his 
life shall lose it ". It is the fundamental law of the 
Kingdom. 

Filled with his Father's spirit,— and it is little 
wonder that with this well beloved son he was well 
pleased, — he enters human society. As he moves up 
and down among men, he finds them that are spirit- 
ually akin to him and to each other. Of these his 
Kingdom forms itself. It is a relationship not only 
deeper, but more real than that of race, or blood, or 
any other tie whatsoever. " Then came his mother 
and his brothers, and standing outside the throng 
they called for him. And when they told him, Be- 
hold thy mother and thy brothers are outside seek- 
ing for you, he answered and said. Behold my mother 
and my brethren. For whosoever will do the will 
of my Father, he is my brother and my sister ". 
What the will is of which he spoke is plain from 
the whole story. The Parable of the prodigal son is 
his portrait of his Father. The Sermon on the 
Mount is the pronunciamento of his Kingdom. It 
is " love ". " Love, even your enemies ; do good ; do 
good even to them that persecute you ". His King- 



236 CHRISTIANITY 

dom therefore has its place, not in the realm of 
knowledge, or morals, but in the affections. 

Now, it will probably not be gainsaid that this is 
the primary article in Christ's religion, — in theory. 
But there are two obstinate difficulties which must 
be overcome before one can consent to subscribe to 
it and enroll himself. The first is: "AH this is fair 
and gracious ; it is no doubt true in that region which 
you call the eternal realities, but our lives are to be 
lived on the surface of the world as we find it. In 
human life, as it actually exists, to adopt this atti- 
tude toward one's fellows is neither practicable nor 
safe; practically it could only issue in the disorgan- 
ization of society and the obliteration of the indi- 
vidual who orders his life thus ". What can be an- 
swered to this.f^ 

Jesus' answer is : " It is practicable, for I have 
done it; it may or may not be safe, as the case may 
be ". When it is once admitted that sincere good 
will on the part of each man toward every other 
man would transform this world from a bad place 
to live in to a good one, the question of its practica- 
bility will of necessity take a subordinate place. The 
thing which is good, and which men know to be 
good, will in the long run prevail. But the run is 
a very long one indeed. At the stage of the race 
where we now are it seems as though the goal would 
not be reached within any measurable time. 

Let us say, then, that our word " love " is, ma3^be, 
too strong a term to use for that temper toward 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 237 

one's fellows wliicli Christ prescribes. As a rule, we 
reserve that word for one supreme and imperious 
affection. " Well-disposed " is a more accurate ex- 
pression. The benediction is to " men well-willed ". 
The affectional attitude of the Christian toward all 
men does not in any wise preclude him from those 
personal and intimate affections which constitute his 
own life. Every man is not called upon, for exam- 
ple, to love his neighbor's wife as his own. Nor is 
he at liberty to ignore moral differences, and be 
pleased with the saint and the harlot alike. What is 
demanded is that he shall recognize his kinship with 
all his Father's children, and do for each what is 
the real best, not, maybe, the thing which his brother 
wants, but the thing which is best for him. To love 
one's neighbor as himself does not mean to love him 
in ways in which one has no business to love him- 
self. That this is practicable has been proven ex- 
perimentally ever since the first starving cave-dweller 
shared his bone with a hungry neighbor, or drove 
away with his club the marauding vagabond who 
would snatch his children's food. 

If one shall say, then, " Is this all.^^ Is Christian- 
ity simply to do good to one's fellows ".? the an- 
swer is, " Yes ; this is all ". " For I was hungry, 
and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me 
drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; sick, 
and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came 
unto me. Verily I say unto you that inasmuch as 



238 CHRISTIANITY 

ye did it to one of the least of these my brethren, 
ye did it unto me ". 

But let no one mislead himself. Because this way 
of life is simple it is not easy. The most abstruse 
creeds and the most exacting codes are far easier. 
The person one is called upon to feed may be dis- 
agreeable in his manners ; the stranger who asks to 
be taken in may be just the man who has done one 
grievous wrong; the sick man's sickness may be in- 
fectious; the man one is called to visit in jail may 
be the very one who defrauded him before he was 
sentenced. The difficulty is very great indeed. If 
I love my enemy, I put myself at his mercy. If 
I disarm while my opponent holds liis sword in 
hand, he may run me through. If I allow my- 
self to be solicitous about the food and shelter 
of my neighbors, I must withdraw just so much 
time and energy from my own affairs. If all men, 
even within a hmited area, could be brought to 
begin this manner of life simultaneouslj^, it might be 
possible, but how am I to begin alone .^ 

Christ's answer is, the way to begin is to begin. 
He does not pretend to disguise the possible cost. 
Indeed it would seem as though he had pointed to 
every conceivable peril which might daunt the cour- 
age of disciples. He forewarned them that they 
should be hated and persecuted; that men would say 
all manner of evil concerning them ; that they would 
be cast out of the world's synagogues, and maybe 
killed. And they were. And so was he. But he as- 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 239 

sured them that not a hair of their heads would be 
wasted. There is no such thing as ultimate waste in 
any of God's Kingdoms. But all the same, the goal 
toward which any kingdom moves is reached without 
any regard to seeming prodigality. This is to be 
said, however, the Kingdom is now so well estab- 
lished, and comprehends so many individuals, that its 
law of life has to a large extent been welcomed by 
the environing world. There is little danger now 
and here of the lions or the stake. Few men now 
adopt the law of Selfishness as their guiding prin- 
ciple. Competition is surely disappearing even from 
regions where it controlled for ages. Indeed the 
extraordinary phenomenon is now being seen, — the 
principle of competition invoking the aid of national 
law to guarantee for it its old place in commerce ! 

Still, it is true and will for ages be true, that 
Christ's Way is so arduous that it will not be adopted 
without some imperious sanction. This sanction he 
provides when he makes it the way of Life, — not of 
happiness, but of existence. Sin is Selfishness ; but 
selfishness, when complete, ends in the extinction of 
its subject. As the circle of a selfish life contracts 
into an ever smaller circumference, it tends to become 
at last only a point, and finally to vanish. This is 
the process through which a soul is destroyed. It 
perishes of self-seeking. Infinite selfishness is soul 
suicide. " For he that loveth not abideth in death. 
Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer, and ye 
know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in 



S40 CHRISTIANITY 

him ". Because such a soul will not help, and is 
therefore useless for the eternal Father's purpose, it 
is allowed to follow its own chosen way to extinc- 
tion, where it can no longer hinder. Allowed to do 
so? There is no power in the universe which can 
prevent it except itself. 

Over against this the same force operates in the 
opposite direction. He that spendeth findeth. The 
outgoing of the soul in love and good will, so far 
from dissipating and weakening its own energies, en- 
hances and fortifies them. The affections are the 
only human faculty incapable of exhaustion. Every 
other has its breaking strain. Thought grows weary 
with work ; the emotions when stimulated too far be- 
come obtunded; but love never tires. Many a man 
has found, to his surprise, and maybe to his con- 
sternation, that when he begins a task of charity he 
becomes entangled in it. It overmasters him. It 
draws him out and on to issues larger than he had 
contemplated; and it does so because through it his 
own being grows larger and stronger. " For every 
one that loveth is begotten of God. He that abideth 
in love abideth in God. And what shall it profit a 
man if he shall gain even the whole world, and lose 
himself in the doing of it".? In other words, only 
he that loves lives. 

This automatic force is the " Fan in the hand " 
of the Son of Man, winnowing forever, separating 
the chaff from the grain on the world's tlireshing 
floor. Thus the Kingdom is being builded. Who 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE INIATTER 241 

belong to it? They who will well to their fellows. 
Where is it to be seen? Ideally it ought to be con- 
terminous with the Church. Actually it is not so. 
Some time, we may hope, it will be so, as the Master 
contemplated. But candor compels the sad confes- 
sion that before that time the Church must learn to 
love. Organizations learn that far more slowly than 
persons do. There is a great multitude whom no 
man could number within those societies which we 
call churches, who would gladly walk together in 
unity and live as brethren in one house, but who are 
let and hindered in doing so because their organiza- 
tions, as such, have not the mind of Christ. Instead 
of humbling, they exalt themselves. Instead of con- 
sidering each the things of another, each seeks the 
things of its own. It could not be otherwise, since 
for these many centuries they have thought of the 
Kingdom as resting upon a Creed or a Code. These 
are regarded as completing the essential equipment 
of a church. The stuff of which that is built is 
not supplied by the understanding or the conscience, 
but the heart. So comes the paradox that a church 
whose members generally are " children of the King- 
dom " may as an organization exhibit precisely those 
phenomena which the law of the Kingdom condemns. 
It may act toward other churches as no Christian 
would think of acting toward another Christian. In 
a word, it is loveless. Whether it be true or not 
that " corporations have no souls ", it is approx- 
imately true that churches have no hearts. They act 



M2 CHRISTIANITY 

indeed amazingly like corporations. The chief end, 
to which all else is subordinated, is extension, in- 
crease, success. If their doctrine and discipline be 
consistent and efficient, they fancy themselves secure. 
He who listens attentively to the multitudinous 
voices of our world of to-day will learn that it is 
well disposed toward a revival of religion. But it 
must be a religion which will satisfy its real long- 
ings. Its mind has been for two or three generations 
stimulated to a preternatural activity. It already be- 
gins to show symptoms of that lassitude which fa- 
tigue produces. It is ready to turn away for a while 
from education and business to religion. It is no 
longer in the mood to be moved by a religion of 
thought or a religion of rules. It is not much inter- 
ested in " being saved " ; but it is deeply concerned 
to be " going about doing good ". It is feeling the 
compulsion of " Christ in the midst of the ages ". 
But because the phenomena of Love are vastly more 
difficult to organize than those of thought and con- 
science, they are looked at askance by those who 
would translate the Kingdom into some well-rounded 
and articulate institution. The energy of the Chris- 
tian world tends steadily to escape from their insti- 
tutions and to express itself in good will. Why 
should not the Church recognize in this the working 
of a true instinct.'^ Why should it refuse any longer 
to make this spirit in the individual the condition, 
and the only condition, of membership? Does it not 
in its actual practice expose itself to the rebuke which 



THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER 243 

the disciple met when he forbade a man to cast out 
devils " because he f olloweth not with us " ? Or those 
others who would have kept foolish little children 
from him? Is there a church on earth to-day which 
will open its gates hospitably to the man who can 
only say that he wills well to his fellows, and that 
in the Son of Man he recognizes a Son of God? 
And if it be true that of such as these are the King- 
dom of Heaven, how can the Church, lacking them, 
represent the Kingdom? 



JAN 29 1912 



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